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Title: Benjamin Franklin
Author: McKown, Robin
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Benjamin Franklin" ***
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
by
Robin McKown
[Illustration: Publisher logo]
G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York
To Rosalie Quine
Third Impression
© 1963 by Robin McKown
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-9688
Manufactured in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in the Dominion of Canada
by Longmans Canada Limited, Toronto
10216
CONTENTS
1. A Boyhood in Boston 9
2. A Young Man on His Own 18
3. The Birth of Poor Richard 28
4. The Civic-Minded Citizen 38
5. The Thunder Giant 49
6. A Brief Military Career 61
7. The Battle with the Penns 73
8. The White Christian Savages 84
9. The Stamp Act 91
10. Friendships in England 100
11. The Terrible Hutchinson Letters 111
12. Beginning of a Long War 123
13. The Splendid Word Independence 132
14. France Falls in Love with an American 143
15. America’s First Ambassador 155
16. A Glorious Old Age 165
17. The Closing Years 177
_Suggested Reading_ 188
_Index_ 189
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
1
A BOYHOOD IN BOSTON
The Franklins of Boston were poor, numerous, lively and intelligent.
There were seventeen children in all, seven by their father’s first
wife, who had died after Josiah Franklin brought her from England to
America; and ten by his second wife, Abiah, Benjamin’s mother. Benjamin,
born on January 6 (January 17, new style), 1706, was the youngest son,
though he had two younger sisters, Jane, who was always his favorite,
and Lydia.
They lived on Milk Street across from the Old South Church until he was
six, when they took a larger house on Hanover Street. A blue ball hung
over the door, serving to identify the house in lieu of street numbers.
In June 1713, a firm of slave traders advertised “three able Negro men
and three Negro women ... to be seen at the house of Mr. Josiah Franklin
at the Blue Ball.” Josiah kept no slaves himself but had a shed in which
he allowed these captives to be housed.
Boston was then a busy seaport town, with some 12,000 population, next
largest to Philadelphia in the American colonies. Its harbor was filled
with sailing vessels; merchant ships from the Barbados or faraway
England unloaded their goods at the Long Wharf. Streets were unpaved and
unlighted, but there was plenty of activity in the coffeehouses and
taverns. The town boasted of at least six book stores.
Benjamin could not remember when he learned to read. According to his
sister Jane, he was reading the Bible at five and composing verses at
seven. The verse writing was inspired by his father’s brother, Uncle
Benjamin, a versifier himself, who appeared at varying intervals,
usually staying as long as his welcome lasted.
At a very young age, Benjamin devoured his father’s religious tracts and
sermons, but soon found boring their tirades against infidels and
Catholics. _Pilgrim’s Progress_, in contrast, was an absorbing adventure
story, and _Plutarch’s Lives_ opened up a new and exciting world. His
official schooling began at eight and lasted just two years. After that
he worked in his father’s soap and candle making shop, doing errands,
dipping molds, cutting wick for candles.
With so many mouths to feed, higher education, such as that offered at
nearby Harvard University, was out of reach for any of the Franklin
children. To improve their minds, Josiah often invited men of learning
to dinner, encouraging them to discuss worthwhile matters. Though his
trade was lowly, he was one of the town’s most respected citizens.
Leading Bostonians often consulted him about public affairs, or asked
him to arbitrate disputes. He was a man of many skills, was handy with
tools, played the violin, and sang hymns in a pleasing voice. Benjamin’s
love of music began in his childhood.
The values of obedience and industry were implanted in all of them.
“Seest thou a man diligent in his calling,” Josiah would quote from
Solomon, “he shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean
men.” Nothing then seemed more unlikely than that he, Benjamin Franklin,
would ever stand before a king.
He was a sturdy, squarely built youngster, with a broad friendly face,
light brown hair, and bright mischievous eyes. Among boys of his own age
he was the leader—and sometimes led them into scrapes.
Once they were fishing for minnows in the salt marsh. Benjamin suggested
they build a wharf so as not to get their feet wet. For the purpose,
they appropriated a pile of stones belonging to some workmen who were
using them to build a house. The wharf was a success but there were
repercussions when the men found their stones missing.
“Nothing is useful which is not honest,” Josiah told his erring son.
As a youth, he learned to handle boats, to swim, to dive, and to perform
all manner of water stunts. One day he resolved to try swimming and
flying his kite simultaneously. To his delight, he found that if he
floated on his back while holding the kite’s string, he was effortlessly
drawn across the pond. Another time he carved himself two oval slabs of
wood, shaped like a painter’s palette, bored a hole for his thumb, and
used them like oars to propel himself along. In this way he could easily
outswim his comrades, though his wrists soon tired. He tried similar
devices for his feet with less success. For this invention he might be
called the first frog man.
He had no enthusiasm for cutting candle wicks and often dreamed of going
to sea as an older brother had done. Josiah Franklin, sensing his
discontent, told him he could take his pick of other trades. In turn, he
took his son to watch the work of joiners, bricklayers, turners, and
braziers. Young Benjamin admired the way they handled their tools but
did not find these trades to his taste either.
Wisely, his father did not press him. His brother James had returned
from England in 1717 with equipment to set up a printing shop at the
corner of Queen Street and Dasset Alley. Since Benjamin liked to read,
what would he think of being a printer—a trade that deals with
pamphlets, books, everything made with words? The idea appealed to
Benjamin, though he balked when he learned he would be apprenticed to
his brother until he was twenty. His father insisted; the
apprenticeship, legal as a slave contract, would assure him against
losing a second son to the dangerous sea. When Benjamin finally signed
the papers which bound him to his brother’s service, he was twelve years
old. Everyone agreed he was exceptionally bright for his age.
James Franklin was one of Boston’s young intellectuals, belonging to
what the pious Cotton Mather called the “Hell Fire Club,” made up of
clever young men like himself. He had reason to be pleased with how
quickly his little brother mastered the techniques of a printer’s trade.
As Benjamin’s skill began to surpass his own, his attitude changed to
resentment and jealousy. He found excuses to scold Benjamin, and
sometimes gave him blows.
The shop handled pamphlets and advertisements and such odd jobs. As a
sideline they printed patterns on linen, calico, and silk “in good
figures, very lively and durable colours.” In the second year of
Benjamin’s apprenticeship, their fortunes improved with a substantial
contract to print the Boston _Gazette_ for 40 weeks. The _Gazette_ was
one of Boston’s two newspapers, both insufferably dull. When his
contract came to an end, James decided to publish his own newspaper. His
friends scoffed, saying that America had no need of still another
newspaper!
The first issue of James Franklin’s _New England Courant_ appeared
August 7, 1721, during a smallpox epidemic—and was devoted to opposing
the new “doubtful and dangerous practice” of smallpox inoculation. There
is no evidence that young Benjamin took any stand—either for or
against—in the controversy.
The great advantage of working for his brother was that he had access to
books. Several apprentices to booksellers with whom he made friends
obligingly “loaned” him volumes from their masters’ shelves. So they
could be returned early in the morning before they were missed, he often
sat up all night reading. There was also a tradesman named Matthew Adams
with his own library, who took a fancy to Benjamin and let him borrow
what he chose. From reading he turned his hand to writing, composing a
ballad called _The Lighthouse Tragedy_, the account of the drowning of a
ship’s captain and his two daughters.
James saw possibilities in this effort, printed it for Benjamin, then
sent him out on the streets to sell it. (The story of young Benjamin
Franklin hawking his ballads on the streets of Boston would much later
bring tears to the eyes of his aristocratic French friends.) _The
Lighthouse Tragedy_ was wonderfully popular, but his second ballad, a
sailor’s song about a pirate, was such a dismal failure that he allowed
his father to discourage him from trying others.
“Verse-makers are usually beggars,” Josiah Franklin had commented.
Prose was Benjamin’s next effort. His inspiration was a volume of the
London _Spectator_, with essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele,
leading prose stylists of the eighteenth century. He made notes on their
subject matter, laid the notes aside a few days, tried to reconstruct
the original. He changed the essays into verse, endeavored to put them
back to prose. Thus he strove to correct his own writing faults, on
occasion having the thrill of finding he had in a phrase or expression
improved the original.
Both reading and writing were done on his own time, before the shop
opened in the morning, at night, and on Sundays when his conscience let
him miss church. And still there were never enough hours in the day for
all the learning he sought.
When he was sixteen he came under the influence of a book by a man named
Tryon, who preached on the evils of eating “fish or flesh.” He had been
taking his dinners with James and the workmen at a boardinghouse run by
a Mrs. Peabody. Would his brother agree to giving him half what he paid
Mrs. Peabody and let him buy his own dinner? Benjamin proposed. James
jumped at such a bargain. Henceforth the young apprentice dined on dried
raisins and bread instead of roasts and legs of mutton. He even had
money left over for books, and two extra hours in the empty shop to
peruse them as he ate. One of the volumes he purchased at this time
influenced him even more than Tryon and his vegetarianism.
This was Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_, which told of Socrates and his
philosophy.
Hitherto when Benjamin had an opinion, he stated it, as so many do,
unequivocally as a fact. It had been a mystery to him why people so
often took offense and set to arguing the opposite side of the question.
Instead of saying outright what he had in mind, Socrates asked
questions—and indirectly led people to his own opinion. From that time
on, Benjamin used rarely such words as “certainly” or “undoubtedly,” but
expressed his own ideas with seeming diffidence and modesty. Rather than
saying, “This is so,” he substituted, “In my opinion, this might be so.”
He retained this habit of speech the rest of his life.
Outwardly more humble, he was inwardly gaining self-confidence. It
seemed to him that the things which James and his literary friends wrote
for the _Courant_ were no better than he could do himself, but he was
too smart to risk asking his brother to let him have an opportunity to
try. One morning a letter was slipped under the door of the shop before
any of the staff arrived. It was signed by a “Mrs. Silence Dogood.”
Mrs. Dogood claimed to have been born on a ship bringing her parents
from London to New England. Her father, so she said, was standing on the
deck rejoicing at her birth when “a merciless wave” carried him to his
death. In America, as soon as she was old enough, her hard-pressed
mother had apprenticed her to a young country parson, whom the young
girl later married. Now she was a widow with three children.
James printed Mrs. Dogood’s first letter, as well as subsequent ones in
which she expressed herself, wittily and clearly, on such varied
subjects as the folly of fashionable dress, the character of the
so-called weaker sex, the ill effects of liquor, the inferior quality of
New England poetry, the need of insurance for widows and old maids, the
hypocrisy of certain “pretenders to religion,” and the uselessness of
sending dullards to Harvard simply because their fathers could afford to
pay their way.
Not until her column had become the most controversial and the most
popular in the paper, did James Franklin learn that his
apprentice-brother was Mrs. Dogood’s creator.
In the meantime James was having his own troubles. Because of an
editorial attack by one of his contributors on the Massachusetts
governor, James was summoned before the City Council, sent to jail for a
month, and released only when he agreed to make an abject apology. The
City Council then forbade him to print or publish the _Courant_. In
desperation, James and his friends hit on the scheme of making Benjamin,
in name only, the _Courant_ publisher. So it would be legal, James
burned his brother’s apprenticeship papers, although privately a new set
was drawn up.
“Mrs. Dogood” added her voice to the indignation aroused at James
Franklin’s persecution. From the London _Journal_, she quoted an
article: “Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as
Wisdom; and no such Thing as public liberty without Freedom of Speech.”
(Capitalization of nouns was then held part of elegant writing, a
practice which Benjamin Franklin always followed carefully.)
He had a freer hand now and composed many articles for the _Courant_. At
seventeen, he was without doubt the best writer in Boston, with a mind
inferior to none. It is small wonder that his brother felt it his moral
duty to exert his authority over him. There were arguments. There were
more blows on the part of James. Benjamin, by his own admission, was
“perhaps ... too saucy and provoking.”
One day he told his brother he was quitting. A runaway apprentice was
subject to the same penalties as a runaway slave, but Benjamin’s case
was slightly different. James could not make public the secret
apprenticeship papers without getting himself in trouble. He took out
his fury by visiting other Boston printing shops to warn them not to
employ his arrogant younger brother.
Benjamin resolved to go to New York. His only confidant was a young
friend named Collins. Collins persuaded the captain of a New York sloop
to give him passage, telling a fantastic yarn about Benjamin being
pursued by a young woman who wanted to marry him. The captain would not
have carried a runaway apprentice but goodnaturedly agreed to help the
young “ne’er-do-well” elude the female sex.
New York, where Benjamin arrived after a three-day journey, had only
7,000 inhabitants but was suffused with an atmosphere of luxury unknown
in Boston. Streets, paved with cobblestones, were filled with elegantly
attired English officials and wealthy businessmen. Houses were mostly of
brick with stairstep roofs in the Dutch style. Though the English had
captured it from the Netherlands in 1674, Dutch customs still prevailed.
Benjamin called at once on William Bradford, New York’s only printer.
Bradford told him he needed no help—privately he thought the Boston
youth unstable—but advised him to go to Philadelphia and see his son,
Andrew Bradford, also a printer. He could guarantee nothing but at least
there was no harm trying.
In history, William Bradford, a worthy man in his own way, has two
indirect claims to fame. One was that a former apprentice of his named
Peter Zenger braved official censure and served a prison sentence for
the principle of freedom of the press. The other—that he refused a job
to Benjamin Franklin.
2
A YOUNG MAN ON HIS OWN
No one could have looked sadder or funnier than Benjamin Franklin when
he walked down Philadelphia’s Market Street for the first time. At the
Fourth Street intersection, a rosy-cheeked buxom young girl, standing in
a doorway, burst out laughing at the sight of him. It was
understandable. His traveling suit was wet, shrunken and shapeless. His
pockets were bulging with spare socks and shirts. He was hugging a large
puffy white roll tightly under each arm and simultaneously eating a
third.
The journey from New York had been a series of mishaps. His ship nearly
foundered in a squall off the Long Island coast and was becalmed near
Block Island. Fresh water ran low. They would have gone hungry had not
some of the passengers hauled in a batch of codfish. Benjamin found the
aroma of frying fish so tempting that he there and then renounced Mr.
Tryon’s vegetarian regime, never returning to it except for lack of
funds.
Thirty hours later they landed at Amboy, where a leaky ferry took him
across to Perth Amboy. From there he walked some fifty miles to
Burlington, a two-day hike in pouring rain, then caught a boat going
down the Delaware. The captain was short a hand and Benjamin helped with
the rowing.
By the time they reached Philadelphia, his entire fortune was a Dutch
dollar and a shilling in copper. The captain told him he had earned his
passage, but he insisted on paying the shilling. It was a matter of
pride: “A man being sometimes more generous when he has but a little
money than when he has plenty, perhaps thro’ fear of being thought to
have but little.”
A three-penny piece had procured him the three enormous rolls. One of
them satisfied his hunger. He gave the other two to a woman and child
who had been on the boat with him. That night he slept at the Crooked
Billet Tavern, to which a friendly Quaker directed him.
The next morning he made himself as presentable as he could and went to
see Andrew Bradford, the printer. Young Bradford had no work but
hospitably invited him to lodge with his family. The same day Benjamin
called on another printer, Samuel Keimer, who promptly hired him. Thus
within twenty-four hours of his inopportune arrival, he had a place to
stay and a job.
Keimer was an eccentric little man with a long black beard who had but
recently come from France. He was somewhat of a knave as Benjamin would
learn later, and he knew little about his trade. His press was old and
in disrepair with only one small and worn-out font (set of type). But
the pay was good, or so it seemed to a youth who had never had a salary
before. He soon had Keimer befuddled with admiration by quoting Socrates
to him.
His employer was nervous about Benjamin living with a rival printer and
in a few weeks arranged for him to lodge with a family named Read. His
chest of clothes which he had shipped from New York had now arrived.
When Keimer took him to his new landlady, Ben was dressed in his best, a
handsome, husky well-mannered young man, about five feet ten inches,
with a wide mouth and a humorous light in his brown eyes. He was
introduced to the daughter of the house, Deborah Read. Both young people
started in surprise. She was the same lass who had laughed at him as he
walked down Market Street eating his roll.
Debby was a warmhearted outspoken young lady, cheerful and quite pretty.
Although, unlike himself, she had little interest in improving her mind,
he enjoyed her company. There was shortly some talk of marriage between
them. Her parents discouraged the idea, saying they were both too young.
Nor was Benjamin overly ardent in his courtship. He was not yet
eighteen, and far too pleased to be free of family discipline to think
of settling down as a married man.
Philadelphia was largely a Quaker town, with a sprinkling of Swedes and
Finns and a large contingent of German immigrants. The rich farms
surrounding it were cut into deep forests where Indians lingered. Bears
and wolves were still shot at the city’s gates. This “City of Brotherly
Love” had been planned by William Penn, the noble Quaker to whom King
Charles II had made a grant of the some forty thousand square miles of
land that made up the province of Pennsylvania. In contrast to the royal
colonies, like New York and Massachusetts, Pennsylvania was known as a
“proprietary” colony.
At William Penn’s death, his sons inherited the proprietorship. There
was already some resentment because of the vast tracts which the Penns
held tax-free.
In Philadelphia, Benjamin soon found friends of his own age and of
kindred interests. There were three with whom he spent many social
evenings: a pious young man named Watson, an argumentative one named
Osborne, and James Ralph, who fancied himself a poet. They exchanged
ideas on a multitude of subjects and read each other things they had
written. Franklin was not overworked on his job and had leisure for
reading. His needs were few and he saved some money.
Certainly he missed his family but he dared not let them know where he
was for fear of being dragged back to Boston. He did not realize that in
the small and intimate world of the colonies news of a stranger was
likely to get around. He had a brother-in-law, Robert Holmes, who was a
sloop owner living in New Castle, forty miles from Philadelphia. Somehow
Holmes learned of his whereabouts and wrote to tell him the worry he had
caused his parents. Benjamin answered in considerable detail, explaining
the reasons for his departure.
Soon afterwards two distinguished gentlemen knocked at Keimer’s shop.
Keimer spied them from an upstairs window. “Sir William Keith!” he
gasped in awe, and rushed down the steps to open the door, bowing and
scraping. Keith was governor of the province of Pennsylvania! With him
was another important citizen, one Colonel French. No doubt Keimer
expected some important commission. The governor, however, brushed him
aside and demanded to see Mr. Benjamin Franklin.
“How do you do, sir,” he said when Benjamin appeared. “I must reproach
you for not making yourself known to me when you first arrived. I have
heard fine things about you, very fine things indeed. The colonel and I
are headed to the tavern across the way which serves an excellent
Madeira. Would you care to join us?”
“I would be delighted, your honor,” Benjamin told him, removing the
leather apron which was a symbol of his trade. His face was as impassive
as if it were an everyday occurrence to have a governor invite him for a
glass of wine.
Keimer, mouth open, stared at them with the look of a “poisoned pig.”
Over the Madeira, Benjamin learned that Keith knew Robert Holmes, his
brother-in-law, and had seen his letter. Keith, a man of some literary
pretensions himself, had been deeply impressed with his skill at
expressing himself.
“The printers of Philadelphia are a wretched lot,” Keith asserted. “From
what your brother-in-law says, Mr. Franklin, I am convinced that you
would succeed in your own shop. I will do all in my power to aid you.”
As Benjamin basked in this heady tribute, the governor and Colonel
French launched into ways and means of setting him up in the printing
business. All that was needed was capital. Would not Benjamin’s father
provide the necessary backing? It was very unlikely, Benjamin commented.
“I will tell you what I will do,” said the governor. “I will write to
your father myself to tell him how much faith I have in your ability.”
Dazzled, Benjamin agreed to make a trip home to deliver the governor’s
letter personally.
He took a leave of absence a few weeks later, telling Keimer only that
he was visiting his family. A year before he had quit Boston, a near
penniless runaway. He returned in triumph, wearing a new suit, carrying
a watch, and jingling some five pounds of sterling in his pocket. His
mother and father were overjoyed to see him, and his sisters crowded
around him delightedly.
He could not resist going to the printing shop of his brother James. No
doubt he strutted somewhat and bragged about his success. He showed the
admiring workmen his silver money, a novelty in Boston where paper money
was used, and handed each a piece of eight to buy a drink. Only James
refused to be impressed. He grew increasingly glum during Benjamin’s
visit. Later he said Benjamin had gone out of his way to insult him and
he would never forgive him.
That night Benjamin showed his father the letter from Sir William Keith.
Josiah Franklin was pleased as any parent that such an important
personage had taken an interest in his son but did not approve of
Keith’s proposal. In his opinion Benjamin was too young to have the
responsibility of his own shop, he wrote in his politely worded reply.
“I see your father is a prudent man,” Keith said later in Philadelphia
when Benjamin came to make his report. He added that he had found there
was a great difference in persons and that discretion did not always
accompany years. Since Josiah Franklin did not recognize his son’s
unusual abilities, he, the governor, would sponsor him.
He had Benjamin regularly to his fine house for dinner the next weeks.
Gradually he unfolded his plan. Benjamin must take his savings and go to
England. There he could pick out for himself his own press, type fonts,
paper, and whatever else he needed for a printing shop. The governor
would provide him with letters of introduction and letters of credit to
cover everything.
Who could have refused such a splendid opportunity? Toward the end of
1724, after quitting his employment with Keimer, Benjamin set sail for
his first visit to the Old World. There had been a touching farewell to
Deborah Read, to whom he promised to write often. James Ralph, his poet
friend, went with him, having decided to try his fortune in England.
Since the governor was busy with pressing affairs, Colonel French saw
him off. He did not have the letters Keith had promised, but assured
Benjamin they were safe in the captain’s mailbag.
He had a pleasant trip and made one good friend—an elderly Quaker
merchant named Thomas Denham. Not until they reached the English Channel
did the ship captain sort out his mail. That was when Benjamin learned
that there were no letters of credit, no letters of introduction,
nothing at all from Governor Keith. He was stranded in London, with only
twelve pounds to his name.
In his bewilderment, he confided his plight to Denham.
“There is not the least probability that he wrote any letters for you,”
the Quaker told him. “No one who knows the governor would depend on him.
As for his giving you any letters of credit—that is a sad joke. He has
no credit to give.”
“But why?” Benjamin asked. “Why would he play such a trick on me?”
“Do not think too harshly of him,” Denham said charitably. “Keith wants
to please everyone. Having little to give, he gives expectations.”
It was a bitter lesson.
He stayed in London nearly eighteen months. It turned out to be as easy
for him to find a job here as in Philadelphia. Part of the time he
worked for a printer named Palmer and after that for a Mr. Watt. Under
the tutelage of experienced workmen, he perfected his printing skills.
He also attempted to improve his colleagues by urging them to drink
water instead of beer for breakfast. The “Water American,” they dubbed
him, but a few of them followed his advice.
Not that he was a prude. London had much to offer a young man who was
curious and alert and full of fun. There were operas in French or
Italian, plays by William Shakespeare at the Drury Lane Theatre,
scientific lectures, and the lure of dance halls. He wrote a pamphlet
called “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain,”
which brought him some acclaim among London’s young intellectuals. He
presented an American curiosity, a purse of stone asbestos, to Sir Hans
Sloane, secretary of the Royal Society, and almost met Sir Isaac Newton.
James Ralph borrowed money from him and then split up with him without
paying him back, in a quarrel over a pretty milliner. He sent off one
letter to Deborah Read, but never got around to writing another.
He could not have missed observing the squalor of the slums and the
contrasting elegance of the great lords with their postilions and
liveried coachmen. That no such vast difference existed between rich and
poor in America may have struck him, but he drew no moral lesson. He was
not yet a crusader and his heart was set on having as good a time as his
means allowed.
On occasion he went swimming in the Thames with a co-worker named
Wygate, and once on an excursion to Chelsea he dazzled Wygate and his
other companions with a display of the water exercises which he had
invented in his childhood. A certain Sir William Wyndham, a friend of
the great Jonathan Swift, heard of his prowess and invited him to teach
swimming to his sons. About the same time, Wygate proposed that the two
of them travel through Europe, earning their way as journeymen printers.
Both suggestions tempted Benjamin but he rejected them. His Quaker
friend Thomas Denham had offered him a position in his Philadelphia
importing company. Denham had made one fortune as a merchant and was set
on making another. With the crying need of America’s growing population
for goods from abroad, there was no reason why he should not succeed.
The salary was less than Franklin earned as a printer, but there would
be handsome commissions, travel to foreign lands, and, so he believed,
an assured future.
He set sail on July 23, 1726, on the _Berkshire_. It was October 11
before they reached Philadelphia. Franklin, now twenty, kept a journal
on this long voyage. He had time to think, to observe nature, to
philosophize.
An eclipse of the sun and one of the moon were notable events of the
trip, duly recorded in his journal. The passengers fished for dolphins.
He noted their glorious appearance in the water, their bodies “of a
bright green, mixed with a silver colour, and their tails of a shining
golden yellow,” and wondered at the “vulgar error of the painters, who
always represent this fish monstrously crooked and deformed.”
From the Gulf Stream he fished out several branches of gulfweed and
spent long hours studying a growth which he called “vegetable animals,”
resembling shellfish and yet seeming part of the weed. Noting a small
crab of the same yellowish color as the weed, he deduced—erroneously but
with logic—that the crab came from the “vegetable animals” as a
butterfly comes from a cocoon.
The idiosyncrasies of his fellow passengers also came under his
scrutiny. From watching the men play drafts he concluded that “if two
persons equal in judgment play for a considerable sum, he that loves
money will lose; his anxiety for the success of the game confounds him.”
One of the passengers was caught cheating and would not pay a fine. The
others refused to eat, drink or talk with him. The cheat soon paid up.
“Man is a sociable being,” young Franklin wrote in his journal, “and it
is, for aught I know, one of the worst of punishments to be excluded
from society.”
He discovered that there was nothing like a contrary wind to bring out
the worst in mankind: “... we grow sullen, silent, and reserved, and
fret at each other upon every little occasion.” At the sight of a ship
from Dublin bound from New York, on the contrary, he commented: “There
is something strangely cheering to the spirits in the meeting of a ship
at sea ... after we had been long separated and excommunicated as it
were from the rest of mankind.”
Interesting as the trip was, there was no moment equal to that when one
of the mess cried “Land! Land!” In less than an hour they perceived the
tufts of trees. “I could not discern it so soon as the rest; my eyes
were dimmed with the suffusion of two small drops of joy.”
He had set out to conquer Philadelphia three years before and had not
succeeded. Now he was to have another try.
3
THE BIRTH OF POOR RICHARD
Deborah Read was married. This bit of news which greeted his return came
as a shock, though he had only himself to blame. A luscious young woman
like Debby could hardly be expected to nourish her affection on one
letter in a year and a half.
He had, it seemed to him, three major causes for self-reproach in his
past: the grief he had caused his parents by running away from Boston;
the wrong he had done his brother James; and his long neglect of Debby.
He resolved that henceforth his life would be conducted differently.
Printing was behind him now, or so he thought. Under Thomas Denham he
set himself to learning the intricacies of merchandising. He lived with
Denham; their relationship was that of father and son. It lasted only a
few months. In February 1727, the good Quaker fell ill and did not
recover. His executors took over his store, and Franklin was out of a
job.
Swallowing his pride, he went back to Samuel Keimer. To his surprise his
former employer welcomed him with open arms and even gave him a raise.
He soon found out why. Keimer had hired half a dozen men at very low
pay. The trouble was they knew nothing about printing. He needed
Franklin to teach them their trade.
Obligingly, Franklin went to great pains to show the men everything he
knew himself. He did considerably more than he was paid to do. When
types wore out, instead of sending an order to England for more, he
devised a copper mold to cast new type, the first time this had been
done in America. He made their ink, and he started a sideline of
engraving. All the techniques he had learned from the London experts, he
now put to use.
Knowing Keimer, he did not expect gratitude nor did he get it. As
business improved and as the workmen mastered their trade, the employer
grew increasingly uncivil and quarrelsome. He complained that he was
paying Franklin too much and nagged him incessantly. Matters soon came
to a climax. One day Franklin heard a loud noise outside the shop and
dashed to the window to see what was happening. He never did find out.
Keimer was standing in the street below and, on seeing Franklin’s face
at the window, he bawled him out in such violent and insulting terms
that everyone in the neighborhood could hear. No job was worth that
much. Franklin took his hat and walked out, never to come back.
That night a fellow journeyman named Hugh Meredith came to see him.
Meredith, who had been a farmer and taken up printing only recently, was
fed up with Keimer. He proposed that the two of them should go into
partnership as soon as his period of service was up a few months hence.
His father admired Franklin and was willing to finance them. Mr.
Meredith senior soon confirmed the offer, privately telling Franklin he
felt he would be a good influence on his son, who drank too much.
During the next months Franklin did odd jobs and, in his spare time,
organized a club called the Junto. There were twelve members in all,
including Hugh and two other printers, a shoemaker, a joiner, a
scrivener, and others in modest trades. “The Leather Apron Club,” the
town’s wealthier citizens nicknamed the Junto, because of the humble
working class background of its membership.
The Junto met each Friday. Franklin provided them with a list of
“queries” to be discussed. “Have you lately observed any encroachment on
the just liberties of the people?” Already he was beginning to think in
terms of civil rights. “Do you know of any deserving young beginner
lately set up whom it lies in the power of the Junto any way to
encourage?” He knew from personal experience how much it meant to a
young man to have friends to give him support and advice. “Which is
best: to make a friend of a wise and good man that is poor or of a rich
man that is neither wise nor good?” His brief tussle with earning a
living had convinced him that wisdom was preferable to riches.
“Whence comes the dew that stands on the outside of a tankard that has
cold water in it in the summertime?” The latter was one of many
scientific “queries” he suggested to the Junto, in line with his own
curiosity about the mysteries of life.
To improve themselves, to cultivate ethical virtues, to lend a hand to
their neighbors—all were included in the Junto’s lofty aims. They
composed essays on various subjects. If a member read something of
interest in “history, morality, Poetry, physic, travels, mechanic arts,”
he shared his new knowledge with his fellow members.
They were not always serious. Sometimes they met for outdoor sports.
They held banquets, composed and sang songs, made jokes, told stories,
often had riotous times together. The friendships they formed were firm,
lasting as long as they lived.
Occasionally Franklin caught sight of Sir William Keith on the street,
The former governor would look uncomfortable and slink away. His fortune
had deteriorated. Before very long, he fled to England, leaving his wife
and daughter penniless; he died in a London debtors’ prison.
In the spring of 1728, when Franklin was twenty-two, he and Hugh
Meredith were ready to open their own printing shop in a house on High
Street. Their first customer was a farmer who gave them five shillings
to print an advertisement. No sum ever loomed so large.
Customers were few and far between those first months. It was not due to
Franklin’s partner that they survived at all. He was rarely sober enough
to do a day’s labor. His father had been optimistic in hoping that
Franklin could change him. Eventually Hugh admitted that he would never
make a printer.
“I was bred a farmer, Benjamin. ’Twas folly for me to come to town and
apprentice myself to learn a new trade.”
They talked the matter over and came to an agreement. Franklin would pay
back Hugh’s father the hundred pounds he had advanced for their printing
equipment, pay Hugh’s personal debts and give him thirty pounds and a
new saddle. Two of his Junto friends loaned him the money he needed.
Hugh took off for his farm, leaving Franklin, at twenty-three, the sole
owner of the printing shop.
The common people of Pennsylvania at this time were pleading for paper
money, such as was used in Massachusetts and other colonies, but the
wealthier citizens opposed it. Franklin, siding with the people, wrote a
pamphlet on “The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency,” which he
printed himself, and which swayed the Pennsylvania Assembly to pass a
bill to issue such paper currency. For his contribution, Franklin was
awarded the contract to print the money.
Soon afterward, Philadelphia’s most esteemed lawyer, Andrew Hamilton,
arranged for him to print the laws and votes of the government. Business
was beginning to prosper.
With all orders he took infinite pains. He kept his equipment in
excellent shape, cleaning the type himself. He used very white paper and
very black inks and sometimes made decorative woodcuts to illustrate
advertisements. He hired a workman and took an apprentice, but outworked
them both, staying in the shop from dawn to near midnight.
His rival, Andrew Bradford, printed an address from the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the governor in a slipshod manner. Franklin reprinted the
same address elegantly, sending a copy to every Assembly member. The
next year he was voted official printer for the Assembly. He started a
stationer’s shop to sell paper, booklets, and miscellaneous items.
Perhaps to impress the citizens of Philadelphia with his industry, he
carted his supplies from the wharf in a wheelbarrow, wearing his leather
apron.
Philadelphia boasted only one newspaper, a dreary and conservative sheet
which Bradford published. Franklin talked over with his friends his own
desire to start a livelier paper. One of them betrayed him to Keimer,
his other rival, who promptly put out a newspaper with the ambitious
title, _The Universal Instructor in All Arts and Science, and
Pennsylvania Gazette_.
That poor illiterate Keimer running a paper? It lasted only until
September 1729 when Keimer, head over heels in debt, sold it to Franklin
for a pittance and departed to the Barbados, never to return. The
_Pennsylvania Gazette_, as he called it, became Franklin’s newspaper to
run as he wished.
That winter he performed his first scientific experiment, designed to
find out if the heat of the sun was absorbed more readily by colored
objects than by white ones. The experiment was so simple any child could
do it; the wonder was no one had thought of it before. He took some
tailor’s samples—small squares of cloth in black, blue, green, purple,
red, yellow, and white—and laid them out on the snow a bright sunny
morning. In a few hours, the black square, which the sun had warmed
most, had sunk low into the snow; the dark blue was almost as low; the
other colors had sunk less deeply; while the white sample remained on
the surface of the snow.
Franklin thought in terms of the practical value of this discovery:
white clothes would be more suitable than black ones in a hot climate;
summer hats should be white to repel the heat and prevent sunstroke;
fruit walls, if painted black, could absorb enough of the sun’s heat to
stay warm at night, thereby helping to preserve the fruit from frost.
A glazier’s family named Godfrey had been sharing his High Street house.
He was lonely when they moved. Even his close friends of the Junto could
not ease his longing to have a family of his own.
On occasion he visited the Read family. Deborah’s marriage had turned
out tragically. Her husband, a good workman but irresponsible, had, like
Keimer, taken off to the West Indies to escape debts. Even worse, it
turned out that he had a wife still living in England. Debby, who had
come home to live with her mother, was so pale and sad Franklin was
filled with pity for her. Perhaps first out of a desire to do good,
Franklin did his best to cheer her up, and it pleased him no end to see
the color gradually come back to her cheeks as her normally high spirits
returned. No woman had ever appealed to him more than she. In time she
responded to his affection. They were married on September 1, 1730.
Theirs was not the most romantic attachment in the world, but it
endured. “She proved a good and faithful helpmate,” he wrote some years
later in his _Autobiography_, “... we throve together, and have ever
mutually endeavor’d to make each other happy.” Indeed Debby proved the
ideal wife for an ambitious young man. She helped him in his printing
orders, by folding and stitching pamphlets or purchasing old linen rags
for the paper makers, and she ran their stationer’s shop. Since he
preached the need of economy, she obligingly served him plain and simple
fare and contented herself with the cheapest furniture. Nor did she
complain when he went every Friday night to the meetings of the Junto.
The little club had now hired a hall for its weekly gatherings. As there
was no good bookshop in Philadelphia, the members pooled their own books
and loaned them to each other. This practice of communal sharing gave
them so much pleasure that, at Franklin’s suggestion, they commenced a
public library. Every subscriber, Junto member or not, paid a sum down
to buy books from England, and there was an annual contribution for
additional purchases. America’s earliest lending library had come into
being, the first of many civic benefits which Franklin initiated over
the years.
A rival organization to the Junto was the newly established Philadelphia
branch of the Masons, mostly well-to-do citizens. The aim of Freemasonry
was “to promote Friendship, mutual Assistance, and Good Fellowship.”
Franklin succeeded in becoming a member by a rather sly trick, a note in
the _Gazette_ claiming knowledge of the “Masonic mysteries.” Since these
“mysteries” were supposed to be highly secret, the members were so
alarmed they invited the _Gazette’s_ editor and publisher to join their
ranks. For many years he was a leader in Masonic affairs.
He had wanted to be a Mason, but no one could persuade him to join any
church or denomination. That there was one God who made all things and
that the soul was immortal, he believed firmly. He held that “the most
acceptable service to God is doing good to man.” Since all religious
sects, in theory, preached the same, he never did see a reason to favor
one of them above others.
Within a year or so of its inception, the _Pennsylvania Gazette_ had the
largest circulation of any paper in America. Profiting from the lessons
he had learned while working for his brother James, he stressed human
interest stories and local news. He ran an article on the harsh
treatment of a ship captain to the Palatine immigrants. He published
stories on robberies and murders, was not above poking fun at the stodgy
official reports which filled the pages of Andrew Bradford’s paper, and
he took up the cudgel for the freedom of the press.
Most popular of all were his “Letters from the Readers,” many of which
he undoubtedly wrote himself. Thus “Anthony Afterwit” complained that
his wife, who wished to play the grand lady, was ruining him. “Celia
Single” scolded the _Gazette_ editor for being partial to men. “Alice
Addertongue,” another contributor, announced the opening of her shop to
sell “calumnies, slanders and other feminine wares.” He ran
advertisements, sometimes for runaway slaves (it would be some years
before he crystallized his thinking on the evil of slavery), sometimes
for a wife pleading to her husband to come home. He slipped in jokes as
a good cook adds seasoning, and he refused to let the paper be used for
personal quarrels.
In 1732, three years after launching the _Gazette_, he was ready for a
new publishing venture, his celebrated _Poor Richard’s Almanack_. There
were other almanacs published in the colonies; almanacs in fact sold
almost as well as Bibles. Soon _Poor Richard_ eclipsed them all.
Like the others, it noted holidays, changes of season, dates of fairs,
gave weather information, advised the best day to gather grapes or to
sow seeds. Interspersed with such data were proverbs, verses, witticisms
and epigrams, some original but a great many adapted from sayings of
great writers of the past, trimmed to suit an American audience:
Light purse, heavy heart. A rich rogue is like a fat hog, who never does
good till dead as a log. Eat to live, and not live to eat. Nothing more
like a fool, than a drunken man. To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.
None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing. Observe all
men; thyself most. Half the truth is often a great lie. Lost time is
never found again. Little strokes, fell great oaks. Nothing but money is
sweeter than honey. Love your enemies, for they tell you your faults.
Love your neighbor; yet don’t pull down your hedge. Don’t throw stones
at your neighbors’, if your own windows are glass. The cat in gloves
catches no mice. To err is human, to repent divine; to persist devilish.
A brother may not be a friend, but a friend will always be a brother.
And, a tribute to Debby: “He that has not got a wife, is not yet a
complete man.”
Poor Richard had something to say on practically every subject under the
sun. He was in turn witty, wise, and, in keeping with the time he lived
in, somewhat bawdy. No matter that he was sometimes inconsistent and
contradictory, that he might praise saving money at one moment and make
fun of the miser the next. Americans—farmers, businessmen, wives and
workmen—chuckled at him, laughed with him, and perhaps at times took his
moral lessons to heart. Many of his maxims became embedded in the
American language.
Because of _Poor Richard_, prosperity touched the family that had
hitherto known only economy and hard work. One day Franklin came down to
breakfast to find that Deborah had served his bread and milk not in his
usual two-penny earthenware crock, but in a china bowl. Instead of his
old pewter spoon, there was one of silver.
“What is the meaning of this, Debby?”
“My Pappy can afford a china bowl and a silver spoon now,” she said.
4
THE CIVIC-MINDED CITIZEN
There were two children in the Franklin family now. The first was
William, the other, Francis Folger, whom the father called Franky. He
was proud of his sons. He had reason to want to be a good example to
them.
One day he drew up a list of thirteen “virtues” as follows:
Temperance (eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation)
Silence (speak not but what may benefit others or yourself)
Order
Resolution (perform without fail what you resolve)
Frugality
Industry
Sincerity
Justice (wrong none by doing injuries)
Moderation
Cleanliness
Tranquillity
Chastity
Humility (imitate Jesus and Socrates)
Franklin’s ambitious project was to try to achieve all these virtues,
thus to approach as near as possible moral perfection. This was no New
Year’s Resolution to be lightly made and quickly forgotten. He purchased
a small notebook, ruled the pages with red ink, making seven vertical
columns, one for each day of the week, and thirteen horizontal columns,
one for each virtue.
Each time he felt he had failed to practice one of his virtues he made a
black mark in the proper square. Thus if he put a cross in the Tuesday
column opposite Silence, he judged he had that day talked too much about
trivial matters. The thirteenth virtue, Humility, suggested by a Quaker
friend, was a check on the others; if he was proud of his mastery over
any of his virtues, he would be lacking in humility.
He kept this notebook regularly for a long time. The virtue which gave
him most trouble was Order (let all your things have their places; let
each part of your business have its time). Eventually he had to decide
that he was not an orderly person and never would be. Nor did he ever
claim that he achieved anywhere near “moral perfection” in any of the
others, although he did give credit years later to his daily discipline
for “the constant felicity of my life.”
It is unlikely that in any other part of the world a grown and
prospering businessman would have resolved to make himself more
virtuous, with all the diligence of a schoolboy attacking a problem in
arithmetic. His act was typically American. The colonies were young and
growing and pliable, not old and set in their ways like the European
nations. Young countries, like young people, harbor the seeds of
idealism, yearnings for greatness, deep-rooted desires to be better in
any or every sphere of activity than their predecessors or
contemporaries. The youthful spirit that was part and parcel of America
remained with Benjamin Franklin to the end of his days.
He was always trying to enlarge his mental horizons. For that aim he
taught himself French, Italian, Spanish, and German, not yet dreaming
that he would ever have practical use for these languages. He was at the
same time widening his business activities, starting a branch of his
printing shop in Charleston, South Carolina, on a partnership
arrangement. It was the first of many branches.
In 1733, after an absence of ten years, he went back to Boston to see
his family. His parents were well but there were some sad changes. Four
of his sisters and one of his brothers had died. Jane, his beautiful
young sister, closer to him than anyone else in the family, had been
married for six years to a saddler named Edward Mecom, and had two boys,
but her husband was in poor health and her children were also sickly.
Tragedy had cast its first shadow over her. She would in the years to
come lose her husband and twelve children, two of them dying insane, as
the result of some unknown inherited sickness.
James was living in Newport, and on his way back to Philadelphia,
Franklin paid this older brother a visit. Their reunion was cordial and
old differences were ignored if not forgotten. James too was sick and
knew that death was not far away. His former apprentice promised to take
care of James’ son and teach him the printing business. When James died
two years later, Franklin sent the boy to school for five years and then
took him into his home as an apprentice, thus making James “ample amends
for the service I had depriv’d him of by leaving him so early.”
All his life he would be giving aid—jobs, partnerships, loans, gifts
and, less welcome, advice—to his family, his in-laws, his nieces,
nephews, friends, and children of friends. The assistance was sometimes
unappreciated and seldom rewarded. It played havoc with virtue number
four, Frugality. Nor, as he had omitted the virtue of generosity from
his list, did he ever give himself any good marks for such services.
Sorrow struck him personally on November 21, 1736, when Francis Folger,
a grave and sweet-faced lad of four, died of smallpox. In the midst of
his terrible grief, Franklin refuted a false rumor. It was not true, he
wrote in the _Gazette_, that his boy had died as the result of smallpox
inoculation. Had he been inoculated, his life might have been spared. He
felt it important that his readers should know that he considered
inoculation “a safe and beneficial practice.”
The year of his son’s death, he was appointed clerk to the Pennsylvania
Assembly, and the following year he was made postmaster of Philadelphia.
These were his first official positions, and there was pay and prestige
attached to both. What matter if the Assembly sessions were so tedious
he worked out mathematical puzzles to keep himself awake, and that his
home on High Street now housed the city post office in addition to the
Franklins, various relatives of both of them for varying lengths of
times, servants, apprentices, and on occasion journeymen who had no
other lodgings.
He had six of these workmen now, including a Swede and a German, which
made it possible to print in those languages. They were all kept busy.
He was public printer for Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland. Besides the
_Almanack_ and the _Gazette_, a number of books were coming off the High
Street presses: Cato’s _Moral Distichs; The Constitution of the
Free-Masons_, the first Masonic book printed in America; Cadwallader
Colden’s _An Explication of the First Causes of Motion in Matter_; and
Richardson’s _Pamela_, the first novel printed in America.
Their stationer’s shop now sold books as well as an astounding range of
miscellany: goose quills, chocolate, cordials, cheese, codfish,
compasses, scarlet broadcloth, four-wheeled chaises, Seneca rattlesnake
root with directions on how to use it for pleurisy, ointments and salves
for the “itch” and other ailments, made by the Widow Read, Debby’s
mother, and fine green Crown soap, unique in the colonies, produced by
Franklin’s brothers John and Peter who had learned the secret of its
composition from their father.
In all this hustle and bustle, Franklin reigned as instigator and
executor. He was a little heavier, his brown hair somewhat thinner, his
face more mature, and his manner more calm and assured, but in his eyes
was the same merriment of the Boston youth. Around the house and shop,
he dressed in working clothes, red flannel shirt, leather breeches, and
his old leather apron.
For meetings of the Masons or for dinners with prominent Philadelphians
who were now demanding his company, he had more elegant attire. On such
occasions he might wear his best black cloth breeches, velvet jacket, a
Holland shirt with ruffles at the wrist and neck, calfskin shoes,
high-quality worsted stockings, and a fashionable wig.
Debby never accompanied him to such affairs, nor would she have been
comfortable if she had done so. The years of their marriage had put a
wider social and intellectual gap between them. While Franklin had
cultivated his mental powers and learned to speak as an equal to anyone,
she was the same Debby he had married, grown older and plumper. Her
voice was still rough, her language uncouth, her manners hearty, and her
taste in clothes flamboyant. He never tried to change her. He
appreciated her loyalty, her industry, her warm heart, and asked for
nothing more. “My plain Country Joan,” he called her in a ballad he
wrote and sang for the members of the Junto:
Of their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate,
I sing my plain Country Joan,
These twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life,
Blest day that I made her my own.
As for Debby, had anyone told her that her husband would one day be
among the most famous men in the world, she would have laughed in his
face. Not her “Pappy”—as she always called him. Not that he wasn’t the
best of husbands, a good provider, and really handy at doing things
around the house.
She must have clapped her hands in delight at the stove he set up in
their common room in 1740. Houses then were mostly heated by fireplaces.
Large or small, they had in common that one was scorched on approaching
the fire too closely and chilled at the far side of the room. It was
impossible for a woman to sit by the window to sew on a winter day. Her
fingers would be too stiff with cold to hold a needle. It was taken for
granted that everyone had colds during the winter months, especially the
women, who of necessity were indoors more than the men. There was the
problem of smoke too. With the usual fireplace, most of the smoke came
into the room instead of going up the chimney, blackening curtains and
spreading soot everywhere.
Franklin’s Pennsylvania Fireplace, later called the Franklin Stove, was
made of cast iron, could be taken apart and moved easily from room to
room. It spread no smoke and, most amazingly, heated the entire room an
almost equal temperature.
Debby’s sole complaint about her husband had to do with the way he
spoiled his son William. Ever since the death of little Franky, he
humored the boy to excess. William had a string of private
schoolmasters—one of them decamped with Franklin’s wardrobe when William
was nine. He had his own pony, like the sons of the rich. Whatever the
boy wanted, he managed to wangle from his indulgent father. “The
greatest villain on earth,” Debby once called this clever lad. The two
of them never did get along.
Even William had to take second place after their first and only
daughter, Sarah, was born in 1743. Sarah would bring to her father joy
and comfort to modify the pain caused by his son.
He was busy that year with a new project. In May he issued a circular
letter headed “Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among the British
Plantations in North America,” which be mailed to men of learning
throughout the colonies. Now that the first drudgery of settling was
over, he wrote, the time had come “to cultivate the finer arts and
improve the common stock.”
For this purpose, he proposed formation of an organization whose
members, through meetings or by correspondence, would exchange
information on all new scientific discoveries or inventions, and he
offered his own services as secretary “till they shall be provided with
one more capable.” From this letter grew the American Philosophical
Society, which came into being the following year. (The words
“philosophical” and “scientific” were then used as synonyms.) Its
activities were parallel to those of the famous Royal Society in London.
One of Franklin’s first contributions to the new society was a paper on
his “Pennsylvania Fireplace,” which he and Debby had been enjoying
several years, including diagrams and instructions on how to install it.
He refused to patent his invention: “As we enjoy great advantages from
the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve
others by any invention of ours.”
Also in 1743 he printed his “Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth
in Pennsylvania,” a pamphlet suggesting an academy of learning to match
Yale, Harvard, and William and Mary College at Williamsburg. He launched
this plan not as his own but as coming from some “public-spirited
gentlemen,” a tactical approach he had figured out to be more effective
than using his own name.
The academy, he wrote, should be “not far from a river, having a garden,
orchard, meadow, and a field or two.” It should have a library. The
students—youths from eight to sixteen—should “diet together plainly,
temperately, and frugally.” They should be trained in running, leaping,
wrestling, and swimming.
Subjects studied should be “those things that are likely to be most
useful and most ornamental.” All should be taught to “write a fair hand”
and to learn drawing, “a universal language, understood by all nations.”
They should learn grammar, with Addison, Pope, and Cato’s _Letters_ as
models. He stressed the importance of elocution: “pronouncing properly,
distinctly, emphatically.” The curriculum should include mathematics,
astronomy, history, geography, ancient customs, morality, but not Latin
and Greek, unless a student had “an ardent desire to learn them.”
Franklin’s ideal and surprisingly modern academy was also to teach
practical matters: invention, manufactures, trade, mechanics, “that art
by which weak men perform such wonders ...,” planting and grafting.
There should be “now and then excursions made to the neighboring
plantations of the best farmers, their methods observed and reasoned
upon for the information of youth.”
This “Proposal” was the genesis of the University of Pennsylvania, which
in six years’ time—1749—became a reality. (Franklin was elected first
president, a post he held seven years.)
Philadelphia had as yet no regular police force. Its dark and narrow
streets were in theory guarded by the local citizens, appointed in
rotation by the ward constables. Often citizens preferred to pay the six
shillings required to hire a substitute, money which might be dissipated
in drink, leaving streets unguarded, or to pay the very ruffians against
whom protection was needed. To abolish such abuses, Franklin persuaded
his Junto members to campaign for a paid police force, which was voted a
few years later.
Also through the Junto, he called public attention to Philadelphia’s
fire hazards and means of avoiding them. From this effort came the Union
Fire Company, the first organized firemen in the colonies. Subsequently,
he was responsible for the first fire insurance company in the colonies.
Since 1739, England had been at war with Spain, and in 1744, war with
France erupted. The struggle involved the colonies when, in July 1747,
French and Spanish privateers plundered two plantations on the Delaware
River, a little below New Castle. There were rumors of a French plan to
sack Philadelphia. The city had no defenses. The Quaker-dominated
Assembly had refused to vote money for war purposes.
Seeing danger threaten, Franklin published “Plain Truth,” a pamphlet
which succeeded in convincing even the Quakers of the need for
preparedness. Under his leadership, Pennsylvania’s first volunteer
militia, with some 10,000 members, was formed. He was offered the post
of colonel in the Philadelphia branch. He declined, preferring to serve
as a common soldier. William, now sixteen, was also in service, not in
the militia but in a company raised by the British for a campaign
against French Canada.
In 1748, France, Spain and England settled their difficulties
temporarily in the peace treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. For the time being,
the colonies were free from danger of invasion or attack. At last the
Franklin family could return to normal life.
He was forty-two and by the standards of the time a rich man. Since his
income was sufficient for his needs, he made up his mind to retire. A
fellow printer named David Hall took over the management of his printing
shop. Franklin moved to a quiet part of town, at Race and Second
streets, and bought a 300-acre farm in Burlington, New Jersey, where he
could practice the art of a gentleman farmer.
It was time, he believed, to devote the remaining years of his life to
his friends, to his writing, to the pursuit of learning. Particularly a
branch of learning that had occupied his attention on and off for the
past several years—the study of electricity.
5
THE THUNDER GIANT
A few years before his retirement, Franklin, on a visit to Boston,
attended a display of electrical tricks given by a Dr. Adam Spencer of
Scotland. There is no record of the nature of these “electrical tricks.”
Franklin commented later that Dr. Spencer was no expert and that they
were imperfectly performed. Since he had never seen anything of the sort
before, he was “surpris’d and pleased.”
That sparks could be produced by friction had been known since ancient
times. Little more was known about electricity until, in the first part
of the eighteenth century, a young Frenchman, Charles François du Fay,
identified two different types of electricity: _vitreous_, produced by
rubbing glass with silk; _resinous_, produced by rubbing resin with wool
or fur. Such frictional electricity was brief-lived. Sparks flashed and
were gone, and that was the end of it.
Was there any way in which electric charges could be preserved from the
rapid decay which they underwent in the air? Around 1747 two scientists
were working independently on this problem—E. C. von Kleist of Pomerania
and Pieter van Musschenbroek of the University of Leyden. Within a few
months of each other, they had found a method of storing electricity in
a container. The Leyden jar, this container was named. It was the first
electrical condenser.
In one experiment Musschenbroek suspended a glass phial of water from a
gun barrel by a wire which went down through a cork in the phial a few
inches into the water. The gun barrel, hanging on a silk rope, had a
metallic fringe inserted into the barrel which touched an electrically
charged glass globe. A friend who was watching him, a man named Cunaeus,
happened to grasp the phial with one hand and the wire with another.
Immediately he felt a strange and startling sensation—reportedly the
first manmade electric shock in history.
Musschenbroek repeated what Cunaeus had done, this time using a small
glass bowl as his “Leyden jar.” “I would not take a second shock for the
King of France,” he said.
Van Kleist in Pomerania produced the same effect. He lined the inside
and outside of his Leyden jar with silver foil, charged the inner coat
heavily, connected it with the outer foil by a wire which he held in his
hand—and felt a violent shock run into his arm and chest.
A Leyden jar could take any number of forms. Even a wine bottle would
serve. The type used most frequently during the next few years was a
glass tube, some two and a half feet long, and just big enough around so
that a man might grasp it easily in his hand. The advantage of this size
and shape was that it could most conveniently be electrified, which was
then done by hand, by rubbing the glass with a cloth or buckskin. This
simple device gave impetus to research on electricity throughout Europe.
It also provided a new form of entertainment.
Performers went from town to town with their Leyden jars, giving
spectators the thrill of receiving electric shocks, and extolling the
marvels of “electrical fire.” Louis XV of France invited his guests to
watch a novel spectacle arranged by his court philosopher, Abbé
Jean-Antoine Nollet. The King’s Guard in full uniform lined up before
the throne, holding hands. The first one was instructed to grasp the
wire or chain connected to the Leyden jar. They all jumped convulsively
into the air as an electric current passed through them.
In Italy some scientists tried to cure paralysis by electric shock,
claiming moderate success. In May 1748, for instance, Jean-François
Calgagnia, thirty-five years old, was given an electric shock from a
simple cylinder-type Leyden jar. Since the age of twelve, his left arm
had been so paralyzed he could not lift his hand to his head. After the
first electrical treatment he at once raised his arm and touched his
face. There is no record as to whether the cure was permanent.
After Franklin became aware of this phenomenon, he was agog to try
experiments on his own. He wrote of his interest to a London friend,
Peter Collinson, a Quaker merchant and member of the Royal Society.
Collinson promptly sent him a glass tube, along with suggestions as to
how it might be used for electrical experiments. This was all Franklin
needed to get started.
He was not trained in scientific matters as were many of his European
contemporaries. He was unfamiliar with scientific jargon, and could only
write about what he was doing in everyday language. But he had those
qualities that are innate in any scientist, with or without a university
degree—an inquiring mind, patience, and persistence.
His experiments, beginning with the winter of 1746, covered a wide
range. He melted brass and steel needles by electricity, magnetized
needles, fired dry gunpowder by an electric spark. He stripped the
gilding from a book, and he electrified a small metallic crown above an
engraving of the King of England—so that whoever touched the crown
received a shock!
His home was soon so crowded with curious visitors trooping up and down
the stairs, he could hardly get any work done. He solved the problem by
having a glass blower make tubes similar to his, passing them out to
friends so they could make their own experiments.
Several of the Junto members worked closely with him. At first they
electrified the tube, as was still done in Europe, by vigorously rubbing
one side of it with a piece of buckskin. One of the club members, a
Silversmith named Philip Synge, devised a sort of grindstone, which
revolved the tube as one turned a handle. To charge the tube with
electricity, all that was needed was to hold the buckskin against the
glass as it revolved, a vast saving in physical labor.
Another invention of Franklin and his associates was the first storage
battery. For electrical plates they used eleven window glass panes about
six by eight inches in size, covered with sheets of lead, and hung on
silk cords by means of hooks of lead wire. They found it as easy to
charge this “battery” with frictional electricity as to charge a single
pane of glass.
Among his disciples was an unemployed Baptist minister named Ebenezer
Kinnersley. Franklin suggested he might both serve science and earn his
living if he held electrical demonstrations. Kinnersley’s first
announcement of a lecture, held in Newport, described “electrical fire”
as having “an appearance like fishes swimming in the air,” claiming this
fire would “live in water, a river not being sufficient to quench the
smallest spark of it.” He promised his audience such wonders as
“electrified money, which scarce anybody will take when offered ... a
curious machine acting by means of electric fire, and playing a variety
of tunes on eight musical bells ... the force of the electric spark,
making a fair hole through a quire of paper....”
Kinnersley lectured in the colonies and the West Indies and was hugely
successful. Neither he nor any of the other collaborators could rival
Franklin’s own achievements.
Early in 1747, he gave the names of positive and negative (or plus and
minus) to the two types of electricity, to replace the unwieldy terms,
resinous and vitreous. Positive and negative electricity became part of
the scientific vocabulary. He was the first to refer to the
_conductivity_ of certain substances. Electricity passed easily through
metals and water; they were _conductive_. Glass and wood were
_nonconductive_, unless they were wet. He also noted that pointed metal
rods were wonderfully effective “in drawing off and throwing off the
electrical fire.”
After he retired in 1748, he spent much more time on electricity. To
Peter Collinson in London he wrote, “I never was before engaged in any
study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time as this has
lately done.” He kept Collinson informed in detail of his experiments,
not because he thought he had the final word but in the hope that his
experiments might possibly prove helpful to English scientists.
It was to Collinson he described an electrical party to be held on the
banks of the Schuylkill River in the spring of 1749: “A turkey is to be
killed for our dinner by the electrical shock, and roasted by the
electrical jack, before a fire kindled by the electrified bottle; when
the healths of all the famous electricians in England, Holland, France,
and Germany are to be drank in electrified bumpers, under the discharge
of guns from an electrical battery.”
For Christmas dinner that year, he started to electrocute another
turkey, but inadvertently gave himself the shock intended for the fowl:
“The company present ... say that the flash was very great and the crack
as loud as a pistol.... I neither saw the one nor heard the other.... I
then felt ... a universal blow throughout my whole body from head to
foot.... That part of my hand and fingers which held the chain was left
white, as though the blood had been driven out, and remained so eight or
ten minutes after, feeling like dead flesh; and I had a numbness in my
arms and the back of my neck which continued till the next morning but
wore off.”
He was apologetic rather than frightened by the near catastrophe,
comparing himself to the Irishman “who, being about to steal powder,
made a hole in the cask with a hot iron.”
This was soon after he had come to the conclusion that what he now
called “electrical fluid” had much in common with lightning—that indeed
they might be one and the same thing. He was not the first to propose
this theory but no one before him had been able to suggest how it might
be tested.
Thunder and lightning had mystified humanity since the beginning of
recorded history. The Greeks had held that thunderbolts were launched by
the god Jupiter. (One Greek philosopher, Empedocles, thought that
lightning was caused by the rays of the sun striking the clouds.)
Hunters of primitive tribes prayed to the god of lightning, who was a
killer, as they wished to be. Certain medicine men were said to be
endowed with the gift of summoning lightning at will.
Since biblical days, lightning was assumed to be an act of heavenly
vengeance, but no one could explain the paradox that it struck church
steeples more frequently than other buildings. In medieval times, people
believed that ringing church bells would keep lightning away, a belief
that survived the death of countless unfortunate bell ringers.
About 1718, an English scientist, Jonathan Edwards, suggested that
thunder and lightning might be produced by a “mighty fermentation, that
is some way promoted by the cool moisture, and perhaps attraction of the
clouds.” There had been very few other attempts to give a scientific
explanation of the phenomenon, and even in Franklin’s time many
preachers considered lightning a manifestation of the Divine Will.
“Electrical fluid” and lightning had in common, Franklin wrote in his
notes on November 7, 1749, that they both gave light, had a crooked
direction and swift motion, and were conducted by metals. Both melted
metals and could destroy animals. Since they were similar in so many
respects, would it not follow that lightning, like “electrical fluid”
would be attracted by pointed rods? “Let the experiment be made.”
By May 1750, he was sure enough of his hypothesis that he elaborated to
Peter Collinson the advantages to humanity of what later were called
lightning rods:
I am of the opinion that houses, ships, and even towers and churches
may be effectually secured from the strokes of lightning ... if,
instead of the round balls of wood or metal which are commonly placed
on tops of weathercocks, vanes, or masts, there should be a rod of
iron eight or ten feet in length, sharpened gradually to a point like
a needle ... the electric fire would, I think, be drawn out of a cloud
silently, before it could come near enough to strike....
Did he guess that he was on the verge of the most momentous discovery of
the century—one which would assure his name a place among the immortals?
It is fairly certain he was more interested in solving a perplexing
problem than in immortality. Possibly he took it for granted that
European scientists were already three steps ahead of him.
By July he had prepared a manuscript describing all his exciting
experiments of the past two years, and including specific instructions
for setting up a lightning rod on a tower or steeple, even to the
necessary feature of a grounding wire. “Let the experiment be made,” he
had said. He did not make it himself, not then. For one thing, he was
waiting for a spire to be erected on the top of Christ Church, from
which he wished to make his first try of drawing lightning from the
skies. Also, in spite of his alleged retirement, his days were becoming
increasingly filled with public duties.
He still had the Gazette and _Poor Richard’s Almanack_ to publish and
edit. Beginning in 1748, he served on the City Council. Since 1749 he
was Grand Master of the Masons. In 1751 he was made an alderman and a
member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, where previously he had served as
clerk.
In 1750, an American Philosophical Society member, Dr. Thomas Bond, came
to him for help in starting a hospital for the sick and the insane.
Hitherto those who could not pay for medical care had no choice but the
prison or the almshouse. The need was urgent but Dr. Bond had failed to
arouse interest in his project.
“Those whom I ask to subscribe,” he confided to Franklin, “often ask me
whether I have consulted you and what you think of it. When I tell them
I have not, they don’t subscribe.”
Franklin knew promotion methods as Dr. Bond did not, and began by
calling a meeting of citizens. Under his impetus the list of subscribers
grew, though not until May 1755 was the cornerstone of the Pennsylvania
Hospital laid on Eighth Street between Spruce and Pine. Nearly thirty
years later, when Dr. Benjamin Rush joined the staff, the “lunatics” at
Pennsylvania Hospital received the first intelligent care available in
America and, with few exceptions, in the world.
Franklin was also busy during this period in the formation of America’s
first insurance company (stemming from a meeting of Philadelphia
businessmen in 1752), and was taking the lead in organizing an
expedition in search of a Northwest Passage, under Captain Charles
Swaine, America’s first voyage of Arctic exploration.
In the category of pleasure were the infrequent periods he spent on his
Burlington farm, where he raised corn, red clover, herd grass and oats,
recording with scientific precision the effects of frost and the results
obtained from different types of soil. He was one of the earliest
Americans to think of agriculture as a science. He never could persuade
his farmer neighbors to follow his example. They held that the ways of
their forefathers were inevitably the best.
It may have been at his farm that he made his experiment on ants. Some
ants had found their way into an earthen pot of molasses. He shook out
all but one and hung the pot by a string to a nail in the ceiling. When
the ant had dined to its satisfaction, it climbed up the string and down
the wall to the floor. Half an hour later, he noted a swarm of ants
retracing its course back to the pot—exactly as though their comrade had
verbally informed them where to go for a good meal.
There were few mysteries of nature on which at one time or another
Franklin did not direct his attention. More often than not, he wrote his
speculations in long and entertaining and gracefully phrased letters to
his friends, men and women alike.
If he was not impatient to learn what Peter Collinson thought of his
proposed lightning rods, it was simply that he had no time for
impatience. The truth was that Collinson had found his paper fascinating
and had even read it to the Royal Society. As the Society members
remained skeptical and unimpressed, in 1751 he arranged for it to be
printed in a pamphlet—“Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made
at Philadelphia, in America.” Dr. John Fothergill, a London physician,
wrote the preface. The pamphlet was translated into French the next
year, creating immediate excitement.
Three French scientists, the naturalist Count Georges Louis Buffon,
Thomas François d’Alibard, and another named de Lor, resolved to carry
out the experiment on drawing lightning from the skies, which Franklin
had outlined.
It was d’Alibard who succeeded first. At Marly, outside of Paris, he set
up a pointed iron rod forty feet long, not on a church steeple as
Franklin had recommended, but simply on a square plank with legs made of
three wine bottles to insulate it from the ground. During a
thunderstorm, on May 10, 1752, a crash of thunder was followed by a
crackling sound—and sparks flew out from the rod. Here then was absolute
proof that Franklin was right. Lightning and electricity were identical.
De Lor repeated the experiment in Paris eight days later. Louis XV, King
of France, was so moved that he sent congratulations to the Royal
Society, to be relayed to Messieurs Franklin and Peter Collinson. The
first successful experiment in London was made by John Canton. Soon it
was being repeated throughout Europe. The name of Benjamin Franklin was
on everyone’s tongue.
No news of all this had yet been brought on the slow sailing ships when,
in June 1752, Franklin decided not to wait for the completion of the
Christ Church spire for his experiment. He had another scheme. Why not
try to draw electricity from the skies with a kite?
“Make a small cross of two light strips of cedar, the arms so long as to
reach to the four corners of a large thin silk handkerchief when
extended; tie the corners of the handkerchief to the extremities of the
cross.” Thus he later described the body of this world famous kite. Like
ordinary kites, it had a tail, loop, and string. At the top of the
vertical cedar strip, he fastened a sharp pointed wire about a foot
long. At the end of the string he tied a silk ribbon. He fastened a
small key at the juncture of silk and twine.
With this child’s plaything, he and his tall full-grown son, William,
took off across the fields one threatening summer day. They let the wind
raise the kite into the air and they waited. Even before it began
raining, Franklin observed some loose threads from the hempen string
standing erect. He pressed his knuckle to the key—and an electric spark
shot out. There were more sparks when the thunderstorm began. After the
string was wet, the “electric fire” was “copious.”
He must have grinned triumphantly at William, and perhaps said casually,
“Well, Billy, we’ve done it.”
There is no evidence that he realized his experiment might be dangerous,
even deadly.
The first account of the “Electrical Kite” appeared five months later in
the October 19, 1752, issue of the _Gazette_. _Poor Richard’s Almanack_
for 1753 contained complete instructions on how to build a lightning
rod. He had already put one up on his own chimney. It had small bells
which chimed when clouds containing electricity passed by. The bells
rang in his house for years.
News of his triumphs abroad were now flooding in. The praise of the
French king, he wrote a friend, made him feel like the girl “who was
observed to grow suddenly proud, and none could guess the reason, till
it came to be known that she had got on a new pair of garters.” The
Royal Society, making up for lost time, published an account of his kite
in _Transactions_, their official paper, and in November 1753, gave him
the Copley gold medal for “his curious experiments and observations on
electricity.” They conservatively held off making him a member of the
Society until May 29, 1756. At home, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary
College in turn gave him honorary degrees of master of arts.
While these and other tributes were being heaped on him, he was
launching into a new profession—that of military expert and officer.
6
A BRIEF MILITARY CAREER
In 1753, trouble was brewing once more between Great Britain and France,
with the colonists caught in the middle. While English subjects in
America were as yet confined to a narrow strip along the Atlantic,
France held Canada and the St. Lawrence Valley to the north; New Orleans
and the great Louisiana territory in the south. By right of early
explorations, the French also claimed the rich Ohio Valley region and
were building forts along the Ohio and Allegheny rivers. The British
considered these forts an intrusion on _their_ territory.
As the situation grew more tense, both British and French courted the
favor of the Indians. In Pennsylvania this would have been easier had
the policy of William Penn been followed; he had gone further than any
other white man in establishing friendly Indian relations.
Unfortunately, much of his work had been undone by his son Thomas, in
the episode known as the Walking Purchase.
To make room for his immigrants, William Penn had once purchased a tract
of land from the Indians to extend “as far as a man could walk in three
days.” In 1683, he had leisurely walked out a day and a half of this
purchase, some twenty-five miles. In 1737, fifty years later, Thomas
Penn decided to take up the rest of the Walking Purchase. He hired three
athletes to do the walking for him. In a day and a half, they managed to
cover eighty-six miles. The Indians had never forgiven this underhanded
trick.
It was partially to undo this bad feeling that in September 1753
Franklin and several other commissioners were sent by Governor James
Hamilton to Carlisle, some 125 miles west of Philadelphia, to meet with
chiefs of the Delaware and Shawnee Indians and the Six Nations (the name
given to the united Iroquois tribes).
Franklin had never been so far inland before nor had he any previous
dealings with the original Americans. He was impressed with the
ceremonial exchange of gifts and greetings which preceded the actual
conference. These “savages” of whom he had heard such disparaging things
had customs very different from those of the white man, but “savage
justice,” as he was to write later, had as much to recommend it as
“civilized justice.”
The grievances presented by the chiefs after the conference began he
found reasonable. They wanted, from the white man, fewer trading posts
and more honest traders. They wanted to be sold less rum, which was
ruinous to the braves, and more gunpowder, which they needed for
hunting. The commissioners promised to do their best and, as they had
been authorized to do, offered the Indians protection from the French,
in return for their loyalty. Unfortunately, neither colonies nor British
were in a position to guarantee such protection.
Franklin returned from Carlisle to learn that he had been appointed
deputy postmaster, with William Hunter of Williamsburg, of all the North
American provinces. He had the prestige of being an officer of the Crown
though the pay was nominal—only 600 pounds a year divided between him
and Hunter should the service make a profit—and the work was
considerable, for Hunter was ill and could give little help.
He could and did provide his family with jobs. William, his son, became
postmaster of Philadelphia, Franklin’s former job. William later turned
this post over to a relative of Debby’s who in due time was succeeded by
Franklin’s brother Peter. He appointed another brother, John, postmaster
of Boston. At John’s death his widow succeeded him, thought to be the
first American woman to hold a public office.
Not only his family but all of America profited by Franklin’s
appointment. Horseback riders carried mail in colonial America. Delivery
was slow, irregular and costly. Franklin acted as an efficiency expert.
He increased mail deliveries from Philadelphia to New York from once a
week to three times a week during the warmer six months of the year and
he made sure his riders did the route twice a week in the winter except
in the worst weather. In time he visited all the post offices of the
colonies, studied their local problems, surveyed roads, ferries, and
fords. He started America’s first Dead Letter Office, and gave patrons
other services they had never had before. By the time he had held the
post eight years, not only could he and Hunter collect their full
salaries but there was a surplus for the London office, the first time
it had ever profited from its American branch.
Late in 1753, Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia sent young Major
George Washington on a journey to the French Fort Le Boeuf (now Erie,
Pennsylvania) to order the French to evacuate. They chose to ignore the
warning.
Franklin attended another conference with the Six Nations, held at
Albany, New York, in June 1754, attended by commissioners from seven
colonies. In regard to Indian relations, the Albany conference was no
more successful than the one at Carlisle. Afterward the Indians claimed
they had been persuaded to deed a tract of land whose boundaries they
had not grasped and that the deed was irregular since, contrary to the
Six Nations’ custom, it gave away land of tribes whose representatives
had not signed the deed.
Thus the two meetings had the opposite effect of what had been hoped.
They succeeded only in antagonizing the Indians. Many of them decided to
support the French, as the lesser of the two white evils.
It is most unlikely that Franklin suspected any wrong being perpetrated
on the Indians. During the Albany conference he presented to his fellow
commissioners a plan which had its inspiration from Six Nations. If the
Iroquois tribes could work together harmoniously, why should the
American colonies, allegedly civilized, always be quarreling?
Accordingly, he proposed they form a confederacy under a single
president-general appointed by the Crown.
The commissioners approved wholeheartedly but that was as far as he got.
When his plan was presented to the assemblies of the various colonies,
it was rejected as being too dictatorial. The Crown opposed it as being
too democratic. In a final effort to make his point he published in the
_Gazette_ America’s first cartoon, a drawing of a snake chopped in eight
pieces, each marked with the initials of different colonies. “Join or
Die” read the caption. But he was several years in advance of the times.
Even while the Albany conference was under way, seven hundred French
soldiers and Indians forced the surrender of Fort Necessity, a small
barricade fifty miles from Wills Creek, held by George Washington, now a
colonel, and a scant 400 men. The nine-year French and Indian Wars were
unofficially under way.
In December, six months later, General Edward Braddock landed in
Virginia with two regiments of British regulars. They had come to take
the French Fort Duquesne, located on the forks of the Ohio (where
Pittsburgh now stands). The Pennsylvania Assembly sent Franklin to meet
the general at Frederickstown and offer his services as postmaster.
Franklin with his son William spent several days with Braddock. He found
the general a master of European military strategy but more than a
little arrogant.
“After taking Fort Duquesne,” Braddock announced one night at dinner, “I
will proceed to Niagara; and, having taken that, to Frontenac, if the
season will allow time; and I suppose it will, for Duquesne can hardly
detain me above three or four days.”
In his mind, Franklin pictured the long line of Braddock’s army marching
along a narrow road cut through thick woods and bushes, and he was
uneasy. He was sure, he told the general, that there would be scant
resistance at Duquesne, if he arrived there. The danger would be Indian
ambush on the way.
Braddock smiled patronizingly. “These savages may, indeed, be a
formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the king’s
regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make
any impression.”
Franklin did not press his doubts. It would have been improper for him
to argue with a military man about his own profession. Braddock was only
too glad to let Franklin hunt up some transport wagons for him. This he
did by distributing circulars through Lancaster, York and Cumberland
counties. Within two weeks Pennsylvania farmers had come through with
the loan of 150 wagons and 259 horses. Of the 1,000 pounds due the
owners in payment, Braddock paid 800 and Franklin advanced the extra 200
pounds on his own. Since the farmers knew and trusted him, he, rather
than Braddock, gave them his bond for the full cost.
After he returned to Philadelphia, he persuaded the Assembly to donate
twenty parcels for the regiment officers, each containing six pounds of
sugar, a pound of tea, six pounds of coffee, six pounds of chocolate, as
well as biscuit, cheese, butter, wine, cured hams. He sent along other
supplies for the soldiers, advancing 1,000 pounds more of his own money
to cover the costs. Barely had he been reimbursed for his expenses thus
far, when the disastrous news broke.
Braddock’s army—some 1,400 British regulars and 700 colonial
militiamen—was ambushed by a force of French, Canadians, and Indians on
July 9, 1755, when they were within seven miles of Fort Duquesne.
Terrified at the shooting from this invisible enemy, the regulars
panicked. Nearly a thousand were killed or wounded, including most of
the officers. George Washington, who was serving as Braddock’s aide,
stayed to fight a valiant rear guard action. Braddock was mortally
wounded, dying four days later.
At the start of the fray, the drivers took one horse from each team and
raced off, leaving wagons, food parcels and provisions to the attackers.
Since Franklin had given bond, the wagon owners soon appeared, demanding
recompense for their losses—a total of some 20,000 pounds. He faced ruin
until October when the new British commander-in-chief, Governor Shirley,
authorized government payment of the debt.
In the midst of that summer’s harassment and disaster, there was one
pleasant interlude. On a trip to visit Rhode Island post offices,
Franklin met a delightful young lady named Catherine Ray. Middle-aged
and tending to stoutness as he was, she lavished affection on him, not
as a suitor but as someone to whom she could confide her innermost
thoughts. Though he saw Catherine only infrequently after that meeting,
she later married a worthy young man named William Greene by whom she
had six children—she and Franklin wrote each other lengthy and intimate
letters as long as they lived. Until he met her, apart from Debby, his
friendships had all been with men. Beginning with Catherine, he had many
women friends, who found in him a rare understanding of their qualities
of mind and spirit.
The defeat of Braddock taught the colonists that the British military
was not as invincible as they had been led to believe. Many more Indians
joined the French, deciding they were most likely to win. In the summer
of 1755, Indian raiders were attacking isolated farms less than 100
miles from Philadelphia. It was obvious that once again Pennsylvania
must provide its own defense.
A bill to vote 60,000 pounds for the militia was presented to the
Pennsylvania Assembly. At first the Quakers opposed it, but with great
tact Franklin won from them a concession that even though they bore no
arms themselves they would not object if others did so. There was still
more dissension on the subject of taxes. Franklin and many others
believed that the taxes should be raised from all the landholders in the
province. The lawyer for “the proprietors” claimed that the Penn family
should be exempt from such taxes, as they always had been. He was
supported by the conservatives in the Assembly and by Governor Robert
Hunter Morris, who owed his appointment to the Penns.
Eventually the Penns compromised by offering 5,000 pounds toward the
militia as a gift. The question as to whether or not their vast lands
should be taxed remained unsettled, to trouble the future. Thomas Penn,
who was living in London, was duly informed that Benjamin Franklin was a
crafty man who could bend the Assembly to his will.
On November 24, 1755, a Shawnee war party burned down the Moravian
village of Gnadenhuetten, 75 miles from Philadelphia, killing all the
inhabitants except a few who escaped into the forests. The crime was the
more appalling since the Moravians were as opposed to violence as the
Quakers. They were a gentle, devout people who had befriended the
Indians. The next day the Assembly appointed Franklin to head a
committee of seven to manage the funds for the defense. More
responsibilities on his shoulders, more decisions to make, arguments to
settle, hotheads to calm down.
“All the world claims the privilege of troubling my Pappy,” wailed
Deborah to a clerk named Daniel Fisher whom Franklin had just hired.
A few weeks later Franklin set out on horseback with 50 cavalrymen to
recruit volunteers, and check on defenses in outlying districts—a
strenuous assignment for a man nearly fifty and sedentary in his habits.
William served as his aide. Theoretically, James Hamilton, a former
governor, was in charge, but after a few days he quietly yielded the
leadership to Franklin.
Their first stop was Bethlehem, the chief Moravian settlement. Franklin
had expected them to be as opposed to military defense as the Quakers.
On the contrary, they were determined to avoid a tragedy such as that at
Gnadenhuetten, had built a stockade around their principal buildings,
brought in arms from New York, and were even arming their women with
small paving stones to throw out the windows should any marauding
Indians approach.
“General Franklin,” the Moravians insisted on calling the head of the
Philadelphia expedition.
They rode on to Easton next, to find a town in a state of panic and
disorder with no discipline at all. Refugees filled the houses. Food was
almost gone. There was drinking and rioting. Franklin organized a guard,
put sentries on the principal street, set up a patrol, had bushes
outside of town cleared away to avert their use as ambush, and enlisted
some two hundred men into the provincial militia.
They visited other towns, arriving at the ruins of Gnadenhuetten in the
bitter cold of January. After the mournful chore of burying the dead,
the men set to building a stockade—felling pines, placing them firmly in
the ground side by side. Franklin, with his passion for collecting
facts, noted that it took six men six minutes to fell a pine of 14-inch
diameter, and he observed that his men were more cheerful on the days
they worked than when, because of rain or snow, they had to sit idle.
Supplies were running low when provisions arrived from Philadelphia,
including roast beef, veal, and apples from Deborah. To reassure her, he
wrote that he was sleeping on a featherbed under warm blankets. The
truth was that, like his men, he slept on the floor of a hut with only
one thin blanket. The stockade, finished at last, was 450 feet in
circumference, 12 feet high, and had two mounted swivel guns but no
cannon.
They were aware of the danger lurking in the dense forest. On a patrol,
Franklin found the remains of Indian watches. For their fires they dug
holes about three feet deep. The prints in weeds and grass showed they
had lain in a circle around the fire holes, letting their feet hang over
to keep warm. At a short distance, neither flame, sparks, nor smoke
could be seen. But the Indians, not then nor later, risked an attack.
Franklin’s militia did no fighting but they turned defenseless regions
into defensive ones. They had built two more stockades at Fort Norris
and Fort Allen, when Franklin was called back to Philadelphia early in
February for a special Assembly meeting. To have a good bed again seemed
so strange, he hardly slept all night long.
On his return he was appointed a militia colonel. Following his first
review of his regiment, the men accompanied him to his house and saluted
him with several rounds of fire, incidentally breaking some glass tubes
of his electrical apparatus. The following day when he set off for
Virginia on post office business, 20 officers and some 30 grenadiers
escorted him to the ferry, the grenadiers riding with drawn swords in a
ceremony reserved for persons of great distinction. When Thomas Penn in
England learned of this tribute, he was furious. No grenadiers had ever
drawn their swords for him.
As for Governor Morris, he suavely suggested that Franklin and his
command should try to take Fort Duquesne, which Braddock had failed to
take, promising him a general’s commission. Franklin firmly declined. He
had no illusions about his military ability and likely suspected Morris
of wishing to be rid of him. (Fort Duquesne was eventually captured in
1758, in an expedition led by British Brigadier General Forbes; George
Washington hoisted the British flag over the fort’s ruins.)
In August 1756, following a declaration of war on the Delaware, the new
governor, William Denny, offered large bounties for “the scalp of every
male Indian enemy above the age of twelve years,” and smaller bounties
for “female Indian prisoners and youths under eight.” Franklin, like the
majority of the Assembly members, was outraged at this barbarity, and
disgusted with the conduct of the proprietors and their representatives.
Early in 1757, a vote was passed to send Franklin to England, as
official agent of Pennsylvania, there to present to Parliament and the
King a petition of grievances against the Penns.
Debby would not go with him. She was frightened to death of the sea. He
did take William, who was radiant at seeing England. By April they were
in New York, ready to catch their ship. Packets for England were in
charge of Lord Loudon, the new commander-in-chief, an amiable person
with all the time in the world to listen to complaints, indulge in long
conversations, and to write endless notes. Not until he had finished
this mysterious correspondence, would he permit the fleet to depart. For
more than two months, Franklin and his son waited, restless and
impatient and helpless.
There was plenty of time to puzzle about the errors of the British. Why
they should send to the colonies an arrogant man like General Braddock,
a dawdler like Loudon, governors like the dishonest Sir William Keith,
or Morris and Denny, who were far more interested in protecting the rich
proprietors than in the welfare of the colonists. But then the reason
for Franklin’s voyage was to correct such mistakes. He had no doubt that
the King and the mighty Parliament would be glad to listen to him.
7
THE BATTLE WITH THE PENNS
During the voyage to England, Franklin wrote a preface for his 1758
_Almanack_. In the form of a letter from “Poor Richard” to his
“Courteous Reader,” it told of a sermon on frugality and industry, which
Poor Richard had heard in the market place by “a plain clean old man
with white locks” called Father Abraham. He was most flattered to find
that Father Abraham was quoting him, Poor Richard, at every other
breath.
As Poor Richard says: Many words won’t fill a bushel.... God helps
them that help themselves.... The sleeping fox catches no poultry....
Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and
wise.... For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the
horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost....
As Poor Richard says: Many a little makes a mickle.... Fools make
feasts, and wise men eat them.... Pride that dines on vanity, sups on
contempt.... ’Tis hard for an empty bag to stand upright.... If you
will not hear reason, she’ll surely rap your knuckles...
All the nuggets of wise counsel which he had dropped in his _Almanack_
in the twenty-five years of its existence, Franklin gathered for Father
Abraham’s speech. Omitted were the racy ballads, verses, broad humor and
jokes which had made the _Almanack_ a potpourri where every man could
find something to his taste. Only at the end was a touch of Franklin’s
sly wit. Following Father Abraham’s sermon, Poor Richard watched
disconsolately as the village folk dispersed to spend their hard-earned
money as foolishly as ever on the marketplace wares. The only one to
take the sermon to heart was Poor Richard himself who had come to buy
material for a new coat but left, “resolved to wear my old one a little
longer.”
Father Abraham’s speech was later published under the title of “The Way
to Wealth.” It was reprinted in many editions and translated in many
languages, and it won the author almost as much fame as his discoveries
in electricity.
Peter Collinson met Franklin and his son in London, where they arrived
on July 26, 1757, taking them to his home. No doubt he and Franklin
discussed electricity until very late, with William only half listening
and more or less bored. The next day, a printer named William Strahan,
with whom Franklin had corresponded some fourteen years but never met,
called on him.
“I never saw a man who was, in every respect, so perfectly agreeable to
me,” Strahan wrote Deborah Franklin of this meeting, adding that William
was “one of the prettiest young gentlemen I ever knew from America.”
Deborah likely scowled. It was just like that artful lad to ingratiate
himself so quickly.
A few days later father and son rented four rooms from a widow, Mrs.
Margaret Stevenson, who lived with her young daughter Polly in a
substantial mansion on 7 Craven Street, Strand. This was to be
Franklin’s English home, which over the years became almost as dear to
him as his Philadelphia one.
He had brought two servants with him. One of them, Peter, served him
faithfully, though the other, a slave, ran away shortly after their
arrival. Franklin’s post as Massachusetts agent required a bit of pomp.
He wore a wig in the latest fashion, silver shoe and knee buckles and
purchased linen for new shirts. Later he rented a coach.
Barely was he settled when he was invited to visit Lord George
Grenville, president of the Privy Council and one of England’s most
important statesmen. This was Franklin’s first test in holding his own
with persons more steeped than he in political intrigue.
Lord Grenville received him with great civility, questioned him at
length about American affairs, and then announced that the colonists had
some erroneous notions he felt duty bound to correct:
“You Americans have wrong ideas of the nature of your constitution; you
contend that the King’s instructions to his governors are not laws, and
think yourselves at liberty to regard or disregard them at your own
discretion. You must be made to understand that the King’s instruction
are _The Law of the Land_.”
This was simply not true. The King’s instructions were laws in the
colonies only if they received the approval of the local Assembly. In
the same way, laws passed by a colonial Assembly had to be submitted to
the King before they became final. That was why Franklin was in England,
to get the King’s approval of the Assembly decision on the Penns.
Sure as he was of his facts, he voiced his opinion in the manner he had
learned from Socrates: “It is my understanding that ...”
“You are totally mistaken,” Lord Grenville stated patronizingly, when he
had finished.
It was Franklin’s first experience with the contemptuous attitude which
certain of the British took in regard to the colonists. He would later
observe that “every man in England seems to jostle himself into the
throne with the King, and talks of _our subjects_ in the colonies.”
Around the middle of August he called on the Penn family, at their
stately mansion in Spring Garden. It had seemed courteous to meet with
them personally before approaching higher authority. William Penn’s son
Thomas was there and probably Richard Penn and his son, John. They
received him with glacial politeness, listened haughtily as he told them
the Assembly’s grievances, and just as haughtily denied that the
grievances were in any way justified.
Franklin pointed out that the Assembly was asking no more than what
William Penn had promised citizens under his 1701 Charter of Privileges.
“My father granted privileges he had no right to grant, according to the
Royal Charter,” Thomas Penn announced.
“Then all those who came to settle in the province, expecting to enjoy
the privileges contained in the grant were deceived, cheated and
betrayed?” With the greatest difficulty, Franklin kept his voice calm.
Thomas Penn laughed insolently. “If the people were cheated, it was
their own fault. They should have gone to the trouble of reading the
Royal Charter.”
His tone reminded Franklin of a horse trader of low character, jeering
at the purchaser he had victimized. “Poor people are not lawyers,” he
said steadily. “They trusted your father and did not think it necessary
to consult a lawyer.”
Unabashed, Thomas Penn rose to dismiss him. “If you care to put your
complaints in writing, Mr. Franklin, we will then consider them.”
Those arrogant Penns! How it would have grieved their noble father to
see into what selfish hands he had left his beloved Pennsylvania!
Franklin had yet to find out through personal experience that nobility
of character is not always inherited.
Five days later he returned with the Assembly’s grievances in written
form. On the advice of their lawyer, a “proud and angry man,” Ferdinand
John Paris, the Penns sent Franklin’s paper to the Royal lawyers, the
Attorney-General Charles Pratt, and Solicitor-General Charles Yorke.
These gentlemen were out of town. There was nothing to do but wait.
Franklin fell sick with a cold and fever that September and was
bedridden nearly eight weeks. Dr. Fothergill, the man who had written
the preface for his pamphlet on electricity, tended him regularly. Mrs.
Stevenson, his landlady, nursed him like a son. Even William was
unusually obliging, did his errands and helped him to prepare a letter
to the _Citizen_ to counteract slanders about Pennsylvania which
Franklin suspected emanated from the Penns. William was enrolling in law
school in London; he had bought himself elegant clothes that rivaled
those of any young English peer.
As soon as he was well enough, Franklin went on a shopping spree
himself. For Debby, who still liked bright colors, he purchased a
crimson satin cloak and for Sally a black silk one, with a scarlet
feather and muff which William selected. There were other luxuries for
their home not found in America: English china, silver salt ladles, an
apple corer and a gadget “to make little turnips out of great ones,” a
carpet, tablecloths, napkins, silk blankets from France, and a “large
fine jug for beer,” which he had fallen in love with at first sight.
“I thought it looked like a fat jolly dame,” he explained the gift to
Debby, “clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on,
good-natured and lovely, and put me in mind of—somebody.”
His most extravagant present followed later—a harpsichord for Sally
which cost the huge sum of forty-two guineas.
If some Englishmen were snobs, there were plenty of others who were just
the opposite. Franklin’s fellow members of the august Royal Society
welcomed him warmly. He made many new scientific friends, among them the
stout and amiable John Pringle, an authority on military medicine and
sanitation, and John Canton, the first Englishman to draw lightning from
the sky. At Cambridge, in May 1758, he performed experiments in
evaporation with John Hadley, professor of chemistry. He made a trip to
Northampton, the ancestral home of the Franklins, and met some distant
relatives. When he found the Franklin graves in the cemetery so moss
covered that their inscriptions were effaced, he had his servant Peter
scour them clean.
The Scottish University of St. Andrews gave him a degree as doctor of
law. Henceforth he had the right to call himself Dr. Franklin. Later he
visited Scotland where he was made an honorary burgess and guildbrother
at Edinburgh; met the economist Adam Smith; and the philosopher David
Hume, who said of him: “America has sent us many good things, gold,
silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo, etc., but you are the first philosopher,
and indeed the first great man of letters, for whom we are beholden to
her.”
He stayed with the congenial Scottish judge Lord Henry Home Kames, to
whom he wrote in his note of thanks that the time spent in Scotland “was
six weeks of the _densest_ happiness I have met with in any part of my
life.”
A bitter fellow American arrived in London, William Smith, provost of
the Pennsylvania Academy, one of those who had opposed him on the Penn
issue. The Pennsylvania Assembly had tried him on the charge of libel
and he had spent three months in jail. Now he was seeking redress from
the Crown, and blaming not only the Quakers for his arrest but Franklin,
who had not even been in Pennsylvania. Smith was saying that Franklin
was not really a scientist, that he had stolen his ideas from others.
Franklin took the slander philosophically: “’Tis convenient to have at
least one enemy, who by his readiness to revile one on all occasions may
make one careful of one’s conduct. I shall keep him an enemy for that
purpose.”
While the proprietors were stalling, Franklin set out to meet such
high-placed persons as might help his cause. He tried to see the Prime
Minister William Pitt, who was said to be sympathetic to the colonies,
but Pitt was too occupied with his enormous war in India to give him a
hearing. Eventually he met the two royal lawyers, Charles Yorke and
Charles Pratt, to whom the Penns had submitted the Assembly’s
grievances. To his surprise he found they had already given their
verdict, a negative one, which the Penns had forwarded directly to the
Assembly, bypassing Franklin. The Penns were claiming he had insulted
them. He had not addressed them as the “True and Absolute Proprietaries
of the Province of Pennsylvania.”
Back in Pennsylvania, the Assembly had finally persuaded Governor Denny
to pass its act taxing the proprietary estate. Franklin brought the
matter before the British Committee for Plantation Affairs in August
1759, when he had been two years in England. The decision was a
compromise: unsurveyed lands of the proprietors should not be taxed but
their surveyed lands must be taxed at a rate no higher than other
similar lands. The Pennsylvania Assembly held Franklin solely
responsible for the victory, and congratulations flowed to him.
He could have gone home now but he stayed on. There was a tremendous
propaganda job to be done and he was the only one capable. He wanted to
set the English straight on the role of the American colonies in the
British Empire. He wrote articles for the press. He expressed his ideas
at the Whig Club, in coffeehouses where philosophers and literary men
congregated, and to guests whom he invited to dine at Craven Street. His
refreshing candor and quiet wit brought him attention everywhere.
At odd moments he tinkered with various inventions. For the Stevensons,
he devised an iron frame with a sliding plate to serve as a draught in
their fireplace, so it would give more heat and take less fuel. He made
a clock with only three wheels and one hand, which showed hours,
minutes, and seconds. Later others improved his model and sold it
commercially.
He spent long hours constructing a musical instrument, based on the
principle of musical glasses. The “armonica” he named it, remarking that
it was “peculiarly adapted to Italian music, especially that of the soft
and plaintive kind.” Subsequently, an English musician, Marianne Davies,
toured the Continent giving armonica recitals; Marie Antoinette took
lessons from her. Mozart and Beethoven composed selections for the
armonica. Its vogue lasted some fifty years, and then, no one knows just
why, it lost its popularity.
In August 1761, he took William on a trip to Belgium and Holland. In
Brussels, the Prince of Lorraine welcomed him and showed him his physics
laboratory. At Leyden, he met Musschenbroek, inventor of the Leyden jar.
They were back in time for the coronation of George III, whom Franklin
judged “a virtuous and generous young man.”
In February 1762, Oxford University gave the honorary degree of doctor
of civil laws to “the illustrious Benjamin Franklin, Esquire, Agent of
the Province of Pennsylvania, Postmaster-General of North America, and
Fellow of the Royal Society.” Less ostentatiously, William was presented
a degree of master of arts.
William had been basking in the sunlight of his father’s reputation, and
Franklin had more than a little reason to worry about him. Unlike his
father, the youth was proud and haughty and disdainful of those of
humble birth.
One day Franklin told him a story. When he was a child of seven,
Franklin said, some friends on a holiday filled his pocket with coppers.
He went directly to a toy shop, and being charmed with the sound of a
whistle in the hands of another boy, he gave all his money for one like
it. He came home and went whistling all over the house, much pleased
with his purchase, until his brothers, sisters, and cousins told him he
had given four times as much as it was worth, laughing at him for his
folly. Put in mind of the good things he might have bought with the rest
of the money, he cried with vexation. “The reflection gave me more
chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.”
“As I grew older,” he continued, “I have found a number of men who have
given too much for their whistle—popularity-seekers, misers, and men of
pleasure. Don’t give too much for the whistle, William. Why not become a
joiner or wheelwright, if the estate I leave you is not enough? The man
who lives by his labor is at least free.”
Did little Benjamin really spend all his pennies for a whistle, or was
this a fable which Franklin invented to clothe a moral lesson? There is
no way of knowing for sure and it is not important. It should be
emphasized that the story, or fable, was not intended merely to show the
folly of wasting money. It had a far more subtle meaning.
Much as Franklin had come to love England, his heart was heavy with
yearning for his family and his own country after his five year absence.
Since England and France were still at war, he had to wait for a safe
convoy. It was August 1762 when he set sail from Portsmouth. William did
not come with him. The Crown had appointed him to the high post of
governor of New Jersey. He would take a later ship, after his papers
were in order.
“Don’t give too much for the whistle,” Franklin may have warned him once
more before he left.
8
THE WHITE CHRISTIAN SAVAGES
“Benjamin Franklin has lost all his Philadelphia friends.”
That was the rumor which his “enemy,” William Smith, had been spreading.
It had reached Franklin’s ears but he had not worried about it nor did
he have reason to. As his ship sailed into port, in November 1762, the
docks were bright with waving flags and packed with cheering crowds.
Five hundred horsemen escorted him home.
Waiting for him were Debby, his “plain country Joan,” stout, beaming,
and vociferous in her greeting, and his daughter Sally, pretty and
elegant in the London frocks he had sent her. From morning to night in
the next days, his Philadelphia friends, those whom Smith said he did
not have, were filling his house, boisterous and hearty, slapping him on
the back, congratulating him on the job he had done, in every way
possible showing him their warm and lasting affection.
Did he find their manners a bit rough, their horizon of knowledge
limited after his cultured and learned English friends? Nostalgically he
wrote to Polly Stevenson: “Why should that little island (England) enjoy
in almost every neighbourhood more sensible, virtuous, and elegant minds
than we can collect in ranging a hundred leagues of our vast forests?”
Not that America would always remain behind England in the arts:
“Already some of our young geniuses begin to lisp attempts at painting
poetry and music.” And with his letter he proudly included some American
verse he thought might find favor in England.
The supporters of the proprietors were still criticizing him, claiming
now that Benjamin Franklin had lived extravagantly and wasted public
money in England. They were disappointed rather than gratified when he
submitted to the Assembly a bill for his five years’ expenses—for just
714 pounds, ten shillings, seven pence. The Assembly, too embarrassed to
accept such a modest estimate, promptly voted him 3,000 pounds.
In February, William arrived to take up his office as New Jersey’s royal
governor, bringing with him a beautiful and dignified new bride,
Elizabeth, who had been born in the West Indies. Franklin toured New
Jersey with them, along with an escort of cavalry and gentlemen on
sleighs. His heart filled with pride as he saw the respect and affection
with which they were welcomed by rich and poor alike, and his fears
about William were for the moment put aside.
He did some 1,600 miles traveling of his own from the Spring to the fall
of 1763, the first year of his return, taking up where he had left off
in expanding and improving the colonial postal services. Sally went with
him on one trip up to New England, when they stayed with the former
Catherine Ray, now Mrs. William Greene, her husband a future governor of
Rhode Island. When he dislocated his shoulder in a fall from his horse,
it was Catherine who nursed him. The friendships of Benjamin
Franklin—how much could be said of them! He guarded them all, men and
women alike, more preciously than jewels, nourished them with letters
during separations, and with personal warmth during reunions.
In February 1763, the Treaty of Paris brought the French and Indian Wars
to a formal close in England’s favor, but did not solve the tensions
between colonists and Indians which the struggle had fomented.
Though the treaty granted the Indians the lands from the Allegheny
Mountains to the Mississippi, the Indians had learned to be suspicious
of the white man’s treaties and rightly feared that future settlers
would drive them back further and further. Out of desperation, they
attacked English garrisons from Detroit to Fort Pitt.
The English reciprocated ruthlessly. One British general suggested that
blankets inoculated with smallpox be presented to them “to extirpate
this execrable race.” As contagious as any disease was the racial hatred
that spread along the frontiers. In Lancaster County, certain
Scotch-Irish settlers of Paxton and Donegal townships met together and
vowed vengeance on the “redskins.” “The only good Indian is a dead
Indian,” they said. If the warring Indians vanished into the forests
after each assault, why then there were plenty of others—such as those
living under the protection of the good Moravians.
In December, the Paxton Boys, as they called themselves, attacked a tiny
hamlet of peaceful Conestoga Indians. Six were killed outright. Fourteen
others, old people, women and children, who had been out selling
baskets, brooms and bowls to their white neighbors, were taken captive
and lodged at the Lancaster workhouse. Two days after Christmas, the
rioters broke into the workhouse, killing all of them with hatchets.
Streams of other peaceful Indians poured into Philadelphia for
protection.
William Penn’s grandson, John Penn, was now Pennsylvania’s governor. He
ordered the arrest of the murderers but did nothing to enforce his
order. Made bold by this seeming lack of concern, the Paxton Boys, their
ranks swollen by a lawless mob, voted to go to Philadelphia and force
the Assembly to turn over the Indian refugees to their untender mercies.
Franklin’s war activities had shown he condemned atrocities against the
frontiersmen, but he was outraged that Indians who had kept faith with
the white men should have been betrayed. By mid-January he had both
written and printed a pamphlet, “Narrative of the Late Massacres in
Lancaster County.”
The first part retold the story of Indian relations in Pennsylvania. How
members of the Six Nations had first settled in Conestoga, how its
messengers had welcomed the English with presents of venison, corn and
skins, how the tribe had entered into a treaty of friendship with
William Penn, to last “as long as the sun should shine or the waters run
in the rivers.”
It was an “enormous wickedness,” he continued, to assassinate these
Conestoga Indians for the sins of the “rum-debauched, trader-corrupted
vagabonds and thieves on the Susquehanna and Ohio.” It was as illogical
as if the Dutch should seek revenge on the English for injuries done by
the French, merely because both English and French were white.
To what good, he asked, had Old Shehaes, so ancient he had been present
at Penn’s Treaty in 1701, been cut to pieces in his bed? What was to be
gained by shooting or killing with a hatchet little boys and girls—and a
one-year-old baby? “This is done by no civilized nation in Europe. Do we
come to America to learn and practise the manners of barbarians?” The
Conestoga Indians would have been safe among the ancient heathen, the
Turks, the Saracens, the Moors, the Spanish, the Negroes—anywhere in the
world “except in the neighborhood of the Christian white savages.”
Christian white savages! That was a phrase to make people wince. Those
who shared the prejudices of the Paxton Boys were highly indignant. But
the Quakers agreed with him, and the pamphlet convinced a surprising
number of others that it was their duty to defend their city and protect
the Indians who had sought refuge with them.
Panic spread as the Paxton rioters, armed and in an ugly mood,
approached Philadelphia. In the emergency Governor John Penn turned to
Franklin to reorganize his militia. Almost overnight a thousand citizens
rallied to arms, among them Junto members and firemen. On February 8,
word came that the mob was at the city limits. The governor, with his
councilors, rushed to Franklin at midnight, seeking advice. His house
became their temporary headquarters.
The ford over the Schuylkill River was guarded. The Paxton group
bypassed it, turned north, crossed the river at another ford, and came
noisily into Germantown some ten miles from Philadelphia.
“You go talk to them, Franklin,” pleaded the frightened governor.
Benjamin rode off to Germantown with only three of his men, and spoke
with the mob’s leaders so reasonably and sternly they agreed to turn
back. Three days later they had all gone home and quiet was restored to
the city.
“For about 48 hours, I was a very great man,” he wrote Lord Kames. To
Dr. Fothergill in London, he tersely described his activities: “Your old
friend was a common soldier, a councillor, a kind of dictator, an
ambassador to a country mob, and, on his returning home, nobody again.”
The help he had given in a delicate situation did not win him the
governor’s approval. To his Uncle Thomas Penn he wrote on May 5 that
there would 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.”
Instead of bringing the Paxton criminals to justice, John Penn launched
a bitter attack on the Pennsylvania Assembly, whom he called “arrogant
usurpers.” The Assembly membership promptly voted as president their
most controversial member, Benjamin Franklin.
The annual elections for Assembly seats were held in October 1764. Two
parties sprang up: Old Ticket, which supported Franklin and Joseph
Galloway, another liberal, as candidates; New Ticket, the conservatives,
the supporters of the Penns, and the Indian haters in whose hearts still
rankled Franklin’s phrase, “white Christian savages.” The campaign was
stormy and there was mud slinging on both sides. In Philadelphia, Old
Ticket lost by 25 votes out of 4,000. Galloway was upset. Franklin
merely shrugged and went home to bed.
Only in Philadelphia had the New Ticket won. When the returns came in
from the rest of the province, Old Ticket still had a majority in the
Assembly. They convened on October 26, and voted to send the King a
petition begging him to take back the province from the Penns, making it
a royal province. Franklin prepared the petition and was selected to
take it in person to England. John Penn was blind with fury but
helpless.
Franklin was engaged in having a new house built on Market Street
between Third and Fourth. It was of brick, thirty-four feet square, with
three rooms to each floor, and it had a pleasant garden. The kitchen was
in the cellar with a special arrangement of pipes “to carry off steam
and smell and smoke.” It would naturally be protected by a lightning rod
and would be heated by the now celebrated Franklin stoves.
He did not like to leave his house unfinished and he dreaded another
separation from Debby, who was still terrified at the thought of an
Atlantic crossing. But the long political squabble had bored and wearied
him, and he looked forward to seeing England and his English friends
again.
“I will be gone only a few months,” he assured his wife and his pretty
daughter, when he left them in November 1764. He could not then guess
that the few months would stretch to more than ten years.
9
THE STAMP ACT
His ship, the _King of Prussia_, reached Portsmouth in just thirty days.
By December 11, 1764, he was ensconced once more at 7 Craven Street, in
the tender care of Polly and Mrs. Stevenson, exuberant to have their
kind American friend with them once more. How pleasant to be spoiled by
them, to resume his dinners at the Royal Society, his meetings with his
scientific colleagues, to see again his many English acquaintances!
In respect to his mission, his return was less satisfactory. The Penn
family was as influential as ever. For nearly two years, their scheming
prevented him from getting the Assembly petition so much as a hearing by
the King’s Privy Council. When at last, in November 1766, the hearing
was granted, the answer was short and decisive: the King had no power to
interfere with the rights of the proprietors of a province. The petition
was denied.
Franklin tried in vain to have the decision reversed. The proprietors
officially retained their claims on Pennsylvania for ten years more,
until the events of 1776 changed the whole structure of the American
provinces.
An even more urgent crisis retained him in London. Lord George
Grenville, the same who had so blatantly stated that the King’s word was
law in the colonies, was now chief adviser to George III. His situation
was precarious and he knew that his cabinet was doomed if he failed to
raise some money. And where would one find money if not by taxing the
American colonies? Since the Americans had no representation in
Parliament, no votes would be lost even should the colonists grumble at
being taxed.
So Grenville reasoned, and it was thus that he conceived foisting the
Stamp Act on the colonies. The Act was to tax some fifty-five articles,
including all legal papers, advertisements, and marriage licenses. A
liquor license required a tax of four pounds; a pack of cards, one
shilling; a pair of dice, ten shillings. A newspaper on a half-sheet of
paper must carry a stamp worth one half-penny. A civil appointment worth
more than twenty pounds a year took a four-pound tax. A college degree
cost two pounds in taxes.
Grenville called the colonial agents together and discussed his
brainstorm with them. The money raised, he assured them, would be used
in America—for public works and for the maintenance of British troops to
protect them. If they had any better idea for levying taxes, they should
tell him. The agents, Franklin among them, could only point out that no
taxes would be popular; that if Parliament needed money, the proper
procedure was to ask the Assemblies to raise what they could.
Their objections were ignored. Politically, America was then in
disfavor. The English held that the seven-year struggle with France,
with its huge expenditure in lives and money, had saved the thirteen
colonies from French tyranny. They should be grateful. They should want
to help reduce the national debt. Instead they were always clamoring for
something or other.
In quick succession the Stamp Act passed the House of Lords and the
House of Commons, and was approved by the King on March 22, 1765,
scheduled to go into effect on November 1. Franklin felt that a bad
mistake had been made, but that, since the Stamp Act was now a law, it
should be obeyed until a way was found to get it repealed. To an
American friend he wrote that he opposed it “sincerely and heartily.” He
added philosophically, “Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than
kings and parliaments; if we can get rid of the former, we may easily
bear the latter.”
Grenville summoned Franklin to a conference. Was it not a good idea to
appoint Americans as stamp officers to distribute the stamps, so that
the colonists could deal with their own? Did Franklin have anyone to
suggest? Franklin proposed two—John Hughes of Pennsylvania, who needed a
job, and Jared Ingersoll, agent for Connecticut. Somehow it did not
occur to him that he was throwing himself open to criticism at home.
An attack of gout kept him in bed for some time after the passage of the
Act. He amused himself with one of his hoaxes, a letter to the
newspapers mocking certain alleged economists who claimed that the
colonies could never be self-supporting.
In America, he wrote, the “very tails of the American sheep are so laden
with wool, that each has a little car or wagon on four little wheels, to
support and keep it from trailing on the ground.” Wool was so cheap and
plentiful that colonists spread it on the floors of the horses’ stalls
instead of straw.
He next described a mythical “cod and whale fishery” on the Great Lakes.
Did people imagine that cod and whale lived only in salt water? They
should know how cod fled from whales into any safe water, salt or fresh,
and how the whales pursued them: “The grand leap of the whale in the
chase up the falls of Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as
one of the finest spectacles in nature.”
Soon all London was chuckling about the whale that leaped up the
Niagara.
In the meantime a tempest was erupting in America. The Stamp Act which
Franklin had taken so calmly had evoked a clamor throughout the
colonies, loudest in New England and Virginia. At the House of Burgesses
in lovely Williamsburg, an eloquent young Virginian named Patrick Henry
rose to declare the act “illegal, unconstitutional, and unjust,” and to
spout a set of resolutions, defining the rights of colonists as British
subjects, as had never been done so effectively. The Virginia Resolves
were printed in all the colonial newspapers, setting aflame a smoldering
indignation. A new organization, the Sons of Liberty, held parades and
protest meetings.
Franklin was plainly shocked. “The rashness of the Assembly in Virginia
is amazing,” he wrote John Hughes, his appointee as stamp officer. “A
firm loyalty to the Crown ... will always be the wisest course.” The
stupid Lord Grenville had been succeeded in July by the Marquis of
Rockingham. Franklin was hopeful he could be persuaded of the folly and
injustice of the tax. All that was needed was patience.
But the word patience had no appeal in America. When the names of the
stamp officers were published in August, riots broke out from New
Hampshire to South Carolina. Mobs gathered in front of the house of John
Hughes, burning him in effigy, threatening him with hanging and
drowning, until he was forced to resign. Similar demonstrations forced
resignations from Jared Ingersoll and other stamp officers. By the time
the stamps arrived, there were almost no officers to distribute them. As
a further measure, the colonists began to boycott British goods, to the
sorrow of the British merchants who henceforth became the most ardent
advocates of repeal.
The Penn supporters took advantage of the fray to point out that it was
Lord Grenville who was responsible for the hated act—not the
proprietors. As for Benjamin Franklin, everyone in England knew he was
on excellent terms with Grenville. In the stormy atmosphere,
exaggeration mounted to falsehood. Soon people were saying that Franklin
had framed the act, helped to get it passed, and accepted pay for
recommending the stamp officers.
Debby became marked as the wife of the man who had betrayed his trust,
and old friends slighted her on the street. There were rumblings about
burning their handsome new home. Governor William Franklin worriedly
came to try to persuade her and Sally to take refuge with him in New
Jersey. She let Sally go but refused to budge herself.
Cool-headedly and courageously, she collected guns and ammunition and
enough provisions to see her through a siege. Her brother came to stay
with her as did one of Franklin’s nephews. The house was turned into an
arsenal. But no attacks were made. In her heart Debby was sure there
would be none. Why should anyone want to hurt her or Pappy?
The object of this fury was in that very period working tirelessly to
achieve repeal by peaceful means. “I was extremely busy,” he wrote Lord
Kames, “attending members of both Houses, informing, explaining,
consulting, disputing, in a continual hurry from morning to night.”
He conferred with leading statesmen, such as Lord Dartmouth, so much
respected in America that a college was named for him. He dined with the
Minister Lord Rockingham, and found an ally in Rockingham’s private
secretary, a gifted Irishman named Edmund Burke. He sought out the
manufacturers and merchants who were suffering from the American
boycott, and enlisted their support. He wrote letters to newspapers to
convince England’s common people that the Stamp Act was a major obstacle
to Anglo-American friendship.
He used his charm, his wit, his power of persuasion, his writing
talents, his high reputation as a scientist, all as weapons to win
friends for the American cause. The other colonial agents worked with
him, but none could equal his activities. The news from America saddened
him and he knew he had to fight, not only to save his own prestige, but
to preserve what then seemed to him terribly important—the harmony
between the colonists and the Crown.
Finally, in February 1766, there was a breakthrough in the wall of
seeming indifference. The House of Commons summoned him to answer
questions of the probable effects of the Stamp Act in America. He was
dead with fatigue and troubled with gout, but inwardly he was jubilant.
He had coached his friends in Parliament in advance on what to ask, and
guessed without difficulty the line of inquiry of the opposition.
“What is your name and place of abode?” the Speaker asked first.
“Franklin of Philadelphia,” he said, as if there were no need to be more
explicit.
For three hours the questions rained down on him. He answered fully,
drawing from his vast knowledge of American affairs. As he spoke in his
dry quiet voice, peering at the House members over his spectacles, he
gave the impression of a schoolmaster instructing a group of students.
“Do the Americans pay any considerable taxes among themselves?” asked
James Hewitt, Member for Coventry, a town that manufactured the worsteds
and ribbons which the colonists had stopped buying.
They paid many and heavy taxes, Franklin said. He enumerated them
precisely, stressing the debt contracted in the recent war, stressing
too that people of the frontier counties were so impoverished by enemy
raids they could contribute nothing.
“From the thinness of the back settlements, would not the Stamp Act be
extremely inconvenient to the inhabitants?” This was certainly a
question he had formulated himself.
It definitely would, Franklin said. “Many of the inhabitants could not
get stamps when they had occasion for them without taking long journeys
and spending perhaps three or four pounds that the Crown might get
sixpence.”
There were many more questions and then the Stamp Act’s creator, Lord
Grenville, asked sharply, “Do you think it right that America should be
protected by this country and pay no part of the expense?”
“That is not the case,” Franklin told them. “The colonies raised,
clothed, and paid, during the last war, near 25,000 men and spent many
millions.” Though they were supposed to be reimbursed by Parliament, in
actual fact they received only a small part of their expenses.
“Pennsylvania, in particular, disbursed about 500,000 pounds and the
reimbursements in the whole did not exceed 60,000 pounds.”
He had at his fingertips equally factual data on every subject that
arose.
Someone asked, “Do you not think the people of America would submit to
pay the stamp duty if it was moderated?”
“No, never,” Franklin stated, “unless compelled by force of arms.”
Another asked, “What was the temper of America toward Great Britain
before the year 1763?”
He replied, “The best in the world. They submitted willingly to the
government of the Crown, and paid, in all their courts, obedience to the
acts of Parliament.... They had not only a respect but an affection for
Great Britain.”
“And what is their temper now?” he was asked.
“Oh, very much altered,” he assured them.
“What used to be the pride of the Americans?”
“To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain.”
“What is now their pride?”
“To wear their old clothes over again till they can make new ones,” he
said calmly.
The session ended with this verbal blow leaving them gasping.
He had never considered himself a public speaker, and never before or
after spoken so long before such a large audience, but he had won his
point. In less than a month, on March 8, the Stamp Act repeal had passed
both houses of Parliament and received the reluctant assent of the King.
Franklin’s “Examination” was published in London, and later that year in
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and elsewhere in the
colonies. It was translated into French and German.
It was a wonderful victory. There was rejoicing throughout America.
Philadelphia coffeehouses made gifts to the crew of the ship that
brought the news. Taverns served punch and beer on the house. Benjamin
Franklin was once more a hero. Even the Penn supporters had to admit he
had done a fine job. At the Philadelphia State House, 300 guests of the
governor and the mayor drank a toast to him.
Franklin’s own celebration was to go shopping. With Mrs. Stevenson to
guide him, he bought more presents for his wife and Sally—fourteen yards
of Pompadour satin for a new gown, a silk negligee, a petticoat of
“brocaded lutestring,” a Turkish carpet, crimson mohair for curtains,
three damask tablecloths, and a box of “three fine cheeses.”
“Perhaps a bit of them may be left when I come home,” he wrote hopefully
to Debby.
He had asked the Pennsylvania Assembly to let him come home but instead
they appointed him agent for another year.
10
FRIENDSHIPS IN ENGLAND
Some time early in 1766, a young man named Joseph Priestley, a
dissenting minister and a teacher of classical languages in Warrington,
Lancashire, came to see Franklin to ask his help for a history of
electricity he was writing. Franklin gladly gave him assistance and told
him of his kite experiment in more detail than he had done to anyone
before.
Impressed with Priestley’s scientific talents, he recommended him to
membership in the Royal Society. Priestley more than fulfilled his
expectations. A few years later he would discover oxygen—calling it by
the cumbersome name of “dephlogistated air.” He also became a lifelong
friend of the American colonies.
Inevitably, the most brilliant scientists in England and the continent
sought Franklin out and, except for a few jealous ones, were added to
the circle of his friendships. Among the most intimate of these was John
Pringle, whom he had met on his last English trip and who was now Sir
John, personal Physician to England’s Queen. Samuel Johnson’s
biographer, Boswell, once called on Pringle and found him and Franklin
playing chess.
Boswell wrote: “Sir John, though a most worthy man, has a peculiar sour
manner. Franklin again is all jollity and pleasantry. I said to myself:
Here is a prime contrast: acid and alkali.”
With Pringle, Franklin took a trip to the continent in June 1766. They
stayed first in Pyrmont, in what is now West Germany, a fashionable
mineral springs resort. From there they visited Göttingen, where the
Royal Society of Sciences elected both to membership. They met Rudolf
Erich Raspe, narrator of the famous tall tales of the adventures of
Baron Münchausen. In their turn, Pringle and Franklin entertained their
new friends with stories about the giant Patagonians of South America,
which neither of them had of course ever seen. When Franklin later read
the newspaper accounts of their voyage, he noted with amusement that the
Patagonians had grown even taller in the hands of the press.
A letter was waiting for him in London from Debby, saying that Sally
wanted his consent to marry a young man named Richard Bache. Franklin
was too far away to judge the merits of her suitor: “I can only say that
if he proves a good husband to her, and a good son to me, he shall find
me as good a father as I can be,” he wrote. The marriage took place in
October 1767. The ships in the harbor in Philadelphia ran up their flags
to celebrate the wedding of the daughter of their most famous citizen.
The ministry of Lord Rockingham, in which Franklin had such confidence,
toppled while he was in Germany. The King and William Pitt, now Lord
Chatham, set up a coalition cabinet. Pitt, still a good friend of the
American colonies, soon fell violently ill, during which time the reins
of the government were seized by Charles Townshend, chancellor of the
exchequer.
Townshend considered the whole colonial uproar over taxes “perfect
nonsense.” Since the Americans had balked at the _internal_ Stamp Tax,
he resolved to let them pay _external_ taxes, in the form of import
duties on glass, lead, paper, paints—and tea.
By the Townshend Acts, duties were to be collected by English revenue
officers. The acts violated the time-honored right of trial by jury;
those accused of ignoring the revenue laws were to be tried in the
admiralty courts without a jury. As an added insult, the revenue
collected was to be used for the salaries of royal governors and judges
who previously had been paid by the Assemblies and thus subject to some
colonial control.
Franklin foresaw grave danger ahead. The Americans would not accept
these harsh measures. “Every act of oppression will sour their tempers,”
he wrote Lord Kames, “lessen greatly—if not annihilate ... the profits
of your commerce with them, and hasten their final revolt; for the seeds
of liberty are universally found there, and nothing can eradicate them.”
He felt that the colonists’ affection for Britain was such that “if
cultivated prudently” they might be easily governed “without force or
any considerable expense.” But he did not see “a sufficient quantity of
the wisdom that is necessary to produce such a conduct.”
The lack of “a sufficient quantity of the wisdom” on the part of
Parliament and the ministry was almost daily becoming more obvious to
him. Still he continued his course of education and propaganda and
persuasion, and of meeting with men in the government whom he hoped to
influence. Many listened to him. The young and wealthy Earl of
Shelburne, Secretary of State for the Colonies, became his close friend.
In recognition of his usefulness to his country, in 1768 he was chosen
agent for Georgia; in 1769, for New Jersey; and in 1770, for
Massachusetts.
Nearly every year he took a trip from London for his health and to
refresh his mind. In the fall of 1767, he made his first visit to
France, again in the company of his “steady, good friend,” Sir John
Pringle. As a loyal subject of an England frequently at war with France,
he was prejudiced in advance against “that intriguing nation,” as he
called it. Even this first short visit led him to reverse his opinion.
“It seems to be a point settled here universally that strangers are to
be treated with respect,” he wrote Polly Stevenson. “Why don’t we
practise this urbanity to Frenchmen? Why should they be allowed to outdo
us in anything?” Already he was adopting French fashions. “I had not
been here six days before my tailor and peruquier [wig maker] had
transformed me into a Frenchman. Only think what a figure I make in a
little bag-wig and naked ears! They told me I was become twenty years
younger, and looked very _galant_.”
In French scientific circles, his name was legendary. Scientists bragged
that they were _Franklinistes_, a word they had coined. Thomas
d’Alibard, the first to draw electricity from the skies, entertained him
royally. At Versailles, he and Sir John were presented to Louis XV,
whose praise of his electrical experiments Franklin could hardly have
forgotten, and whom he found “a handsome man, has a very lively look,
and appears younger than he is.”
The King “talked a good deal to Sir John,” he wrote Polly, “asking many
questions about our royal family; and did me too the honour of taking
some notice of me. That’s saying enough, for I would not have you think
me so much pleased with this king and queen as to have a whit less
regard than I used to have for ours.” “Our king” to him was still George
III.
He thought Versailles badly kept up in spite of its splendor but was
impressed with the way drinking water was kept pure by filtering it
through cisterns filled with sand.
It seemed as though every time he turned his back to London there were
changes in the ministry. Townshend, who had done more than any man
before him to turn the Americans into revolutionists, died in September
1767. He was succeeded by the Tory, Lord North, a pompous thick-lipped
personage, who had neither the will nor the desire to improve colonial
relations. William Pitt’s health was still poor. He collapsed in 1768 in
the House of Lords, in the midst of a fiery attack on his government’s
American policies. In the same year, the pleasant Lord Shelburne was
succeeded by the Earl of Hillsborough, a master of hypocrisy in
Franklin’s estimation, as Secretary of State for the Colonies.
In America, the Massachusetts Assembly sent a letter to other colony
assemblies, proposing united opposition to the Townshend Acts.
Hillsborough demanded that they rescind their action or dissolve. The
Assembly refused, and was backed by the other colonies. In October 1768,
the British sent eight ships of war to try to compel Boston to pay the
import taxes. Other ships followed. By one estimate the extra military
expenses that year were five thousand times the amount which the
Townshend Acts produced in revenue. Franklin had judged their stupidity
rightly.
In the midst of the American protests against these acts, he was
entertained by the Lord Chancellor Lord Bathurst and Lady Bathurst. He
brought them a gift of American nuts and apples. With an irony that his
lordship could not have missed, he prayed them to accept his present “as
a tribute from the country, small indeed but voluntary.” The nuts and
apples had come from Debby, who also sent him such American products as
corn meal, buckwheat flour, cranberries and dried peaches.
That year young Christian VII of Denmark visited England, and insisted
that Franklin dine with him at St. James. He would not have been human
had he not recalled the proverb of Solomon which his father had so
frequently quoted in his childhood. Now he had not only stood before one
king, Louis XV, he had sat down with a second. There would be others.
The English tried for two more years to make the colonists pay duties
they did not want to pay. At last, on March 5, 1770, Parliament voted
unanimously to repeal all of them but the tax on tea. Franklin commented
dryly that repealing only part of the duties was as bad surgery as to
leave splinters in a wound “which must prevent its healing.” In Boston
on that same day a squad of British soldiers fired into a crowd which
had been pelting them with snowballs—killing five and wounding six. The
“Boston Massacre” became a _cause célèbre_. Bloodshed had been added to
the other colony grievances.
The next summer Franklin visited Ireland. In Dublin, he attended two
sessions of the Irish Parliament. The Speaker introduced him as “an
American gentleman of distinguished character and merit,” and he was
given a place of honor. He noted that the Irish Parliamentarians were
more cordial than their English counterparts, but was too astute not to
realize they did not really represent their own people. Ireland, like
America, had suffered under British oppressive measures, but more
intensely and longer. The appalling misery of the Irish people was a
moral lesson to him. He foresaw that if the colonists did not continue
to insist on their rights, they would suffer the same wretched fate.
Sally’s husband, Richard Bache, came to England that fall to meet his
famous father-in-law. Bache had set his heart on getting a political
appointment and had brought a thousand pounds in case he would have to
pay for it. Even members of the House of Commons bought their posts, a
practice which was responsible for much of the corruption and
inefficiency of the government. Franklin advised his son-in-law to stay
clear of politics.
“Invest your money in merchandise. Start a store in Philadelphia. You
will be independent and less subject to the caprices of superiors.”
Bache followed this advice and within a few years was one of
Pennsylvania’s most respected merchants.
That year Lord Hillsborough, with whom Franklin’s relations had been
only outwardly civil, was succeeded by Lord Dartmouth, whom he liked.
Again his hopes were raised for a cessation of hostilities. In truth,
the ministry and Parliament had never treated him more cordially.
“As to my situation here,” he wrote his son on August 19, 1772, “nothing
can be more agreeable ... a general respect paid me by the learned, a
number of friends and acquaintances among them with whom I have a
pleasing intercourse ... my company so much desired that I seldom dine
at home in winter and could spend the whole summer in the country houses
of inviting friends if I chose it.... The king too has lately been heard
to speak of me with great regard.” In a postscript he mentioned that the
French Royal Academy had chosen him a foreign member, of which there
were only eight.
His Craven Street family was now enlarged to include his grandson
William Temple Franklin, and a distant English cousin named Sally
Franklin who was, like his daughter, an eager young girl “nimble-footed
and willing to run errands and wait upon me.” Mrs. Stevenson continued
to pamper him and nurse him during his spells of gout. Polly, for whom
he always had great affection, was married to a young doctor, William
Hewson. The young couple had been living with their mother since 1770.
There were several weeks when Mrs. Stevenson was away, leaving Polly in
charge. To amuse them, Franklin composed a newspaper, the _Craven Street
Gazette_, reporting the daily household happenings as though they were
world events. In this sheet, Mrs. Stevenson was “Queen Margaret,” Sally
was “first maid of honor,” Polly and her husband were “Lord and Lady
Hewson,” while he referred to himself as the “Great Person”—“so called
from his enormous size.”
When Debby wrote him of the cleverness of his grandson Benjamin Franklin
Bache, born in August 1769, Franklin responded with anecdotes about
Polly’s first boy, whose godfather he was.
Wherever he was, a rich family life was as essential to his happiness as
food. Among his close friends was Jonathan Shipley, bishop of St. Asaph,
at Twyford. “I now breathe with reluctance the smoke of London, when I
think of the sweet air of Twyford,” he wrote after a visit there in June
1771.
The bishop had five daughters and a son, and Franklin more or less
adopted them all. To the Shipley girls he presented a gray squirrel
which Debby had sent. They were thrilled with Skugg, as they named him.
One day the squirrel escaped from his cage and was killed by a dog. The
children buried him in their garden and Franklin composed his epitaph:
Here Skugg
Lies snug
As a bug
In a rug.
At the Shipleys he wrote the first part of his famous _Autobiography_ in
the form of a letter to William.
Another of his intimates was Lord Le Despencer, former chancellor of the
exchequer, who in his youth was reputedly the “wickedest man in
England.” Franklin found him a delightful companion and often stayed at
his country place at Wycombe. “I am in this house,” he wrote William,
“as much at my ease as if it was my own; and the gardens are a paradise.
But a pleasanter thing is the kind countenance, the facetious and very
intelligent conversation of mine host.” With Lord Le Despencer, the
alleged “rake,” he wrote an _Abridgement of the Book of Common Prayer_,
published in 1773.
He was a frequent guest of Lord Shelburne, whose vast wooded estate was
also at Wycombe. One windy day he gravely told the other visitors that
he could quiet the waves on a small stream on the grounds. Ignoring
their skeptical looks, he walked upstream, made some mysterious passes
over the water, and waved his cane three times in the air. As he had
prophesied, the waves quieted down and the stream became smooth as a
mirror. His companions could not conceal their astonishment.
Later he satisfied their curiosity. There was oil in the hollow joint of
his cane. A few drops of it spread in a thin film over the water and
caused the seeming miracle.
Back of this trick was a great deal of serious study on the effects of
pouring oil on troubled waters. In his youth he had read in Pliny how
sailors of ancient Greece had smoothed a choppy sea in this manner. On
one of his ocean crossings an old sea captain told him that Bermuda
fishermen poured oil on rough waters so they could see the fish strike.
Subsequently, he had made his own experiments, finding that one teaspoon
of oil would calm a pond several yards across.
If such a minute bit of oil would still a pond, would not several
barrels of oil level out the surf, making it possible for boats to land
with less danger? He tried out this theory the next year at Portsmouth,
England. With a local sea captain he took off on a barge one windy day,
sprinkling oil on the waves from a large stone bottle. The experiment
was only partially successful. Oil did not diminish the height or force
of the surf on the shore, but he had the satisfaction of seeing that
where the oil had spread, the surface of the water was not wrinkled by
smaller waves or whitecaps.
His scientific and cultural interests were as varied as life itself. He
was in turn occupied with the nature of mastodon tusks and teeth which a
friend sent to London, with the transit of Venus, the causes of lead
poisoning, population increase, geology, salt mines, Scottish tunes,
whirlwinds and water-spouts, and the science of phonetics—the need of
reforms to reduce the “disorderly confusion in English spelling”—and the
curious fact that flies apparently drowned in a bottle of Madeira wine
might sometimes be brought back to life.
His observations on all these matters were published in _Letters on
Philosophical Subjects_, and added to the fourth edition of “Experiments
and Observations on Electricity.” Barbeu Dubourg, a Parisian printer,
issued a French translation in two handsome volumes, which included “The
Way to Wealth,” under the French title, “_Le Moyen de s’Enricher_.”
Philadelphia, wrote Dubourg in his preface, was founded in the midst of
the savages of America by William Penn, a man wiser than the Spartan
hero Lycurgus. In less than a century the city had gone far beyond the
ancient world in the practice of the purest virtues and the most useful
arts. Benjamin Franklin, scientist, statesman, and sage, had now brought
this heroic age to troubled Europe.
The legend of Benjamin Franklin, which would mount to greater heights in
France than anywhere else in the world, was already in the making.
11
THE TERRIBLE HUTCHINSON LETTERS
At sixty-seven, Franklin had an expression at once benign, kindly, and
humorous. His years in England had subtly altered his appearance and his
manner. He dressed with elegance in a smooth wig and fashionable
ruffles, and he was equally at ease with eleven-year-old Kitty Shipley
or the King’s ministers. During the London season, he set out each
afternoon in his coach, often with Temple, his lively grandson, to leave
his card or pay calls on members of Parliament or other influential
persons whom he wished to win over to the American cause.
In the year 1773, he was most concerned with the threat of the British
troops still stationed in Boston three years after the “Boston
Massacre.” Wherever he thought it might help, he argued the folly of
treating Bostonians like troublesome children. “I am in perpetual
anxiety lest the mad measure of mixing soldiers among a people whose
minds are in such a state of irritation, may be attended with some
sudden mischief,” he wrote his Boston correspondent, Thomas Cushing.
One day, during a conversation on this subject, a British “gentleman of
character and distinction” told him that he was wrong to blame the
English for the troops in Boston. They had been requested by some of his
most respectable fellow countrymen.
Franklin was incredulous. The gentleman then turned over to him some
letters written between 1767 and 1769 by two Massachusetts Crown
officers, both native Americans, Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver. In
effect, it was as Franklin had been told. Hutchinson, and Oliver too,
pleaded of England “a firm hand,” even armed forces, to keep order. They
demanded for Massachusetts “an abridgment of what are called English
liberties.”
By the time Franklin read these letters, Oliver was lieutenant governor
of Massachusetts and Thomas Hutchinson was governor. Hutchinson had as
an excuse that his house had been ransacked during the Stamp Act furor.
This did not alter that he had been undermining the work of colonial
agents and betraying the very people he had been chosen to govern.
In his position as agent for Massachusetts, Franklin knew he must warn
their Assembly. After some reflection, he sent the letters to Thomas
Cushing, asking that they be returned to him after Cushing and members
of the Assembly Committee of Correspondence, a small and trusted group,
had studied them. He further explained that he could not reveal the
source of the letters and that he was not at liberty to make them
public. He had no scruples about showing the letters since they were
political, not personal, but he had to protect the “gentleman of
distinction” who had entrusted them with him.
In due time the letters reached Cushing, who followed Franklin’s
instructions. Neither Cushing nor anyone else who saw the letters could
prevent their being talked about. In June 1773, Samuel Adams, one of the
most ardent of Boston patriots, read them to a secret session of the
Massachusetts Assembly. Someone took the responsibility of having them
copied and printed. In the public uproar that ensued, the Assembly
prepared a petition to the King to remove both Hutchinson and Oliver
from office.
Perhaps it was for the best, Franklin decided when the news reached him.
Without reproaches, he wrote Cushing that he was grateful his own name
had not been mentioned, “though I hardly expect it.” He only hoped that
the letters’ publication would not “occasion some riot of mischievous
consequence.”
He was continuing his own methodical and unrelenting pressure to bring
reason to the English government. In September 1773, an anonymous and
stinging satire appeared in the _Public Advertiser_ under the title
“Rules by Which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small One.” Among the
rules cited were:
Forget that their colonies were founded at the expense of the
colonists;
Resent their importance to the Empire;
Suppose them always inclined to revolt, and treat them accordingly;
Choose “inferior, rapacious and pettifogging” men for governors and
judges in the provinces;—and reward these men for having governed
badly.
In all, the “Rules” encompassed every fault and folly of which England
was guilty in its treatment of the American colonies. Ministers and
members of Parliament could not doubt that the piece came from the quill
pen of Benjamin Franklin. It was followed by an even more devastating
attack on British policy: “Edict by the King of Prussia.”
Frederick the Great of Prussia, the “Edict” announced, was now taking up
his claims on the province of Great Britain, which had been settled
originally by German colonists and had never been emancipated. Hence the
Prussian government had the right to exact revenue from its “British
colonies,” to lay duties on all goods they exported or imported, to
forbid all manufacturing in these “colonies.”
From now on, should the British need hats, they must send raw materials
to Prussia, which would manufacture the hats and let the British
purchase them. (This was exactly the manner in which the British were
preventing American manufacture.) Next, Prussia planned to ship to “the
island of Great Britain” all the “thieves, highway and street robbers,
housebreakers, and murderers” whom they “do not think fit here to hang.”
(Here Franklin returned to an old grievance—Britain’s using the colonies
as a dumping ground for convicts. In 1751 he had proposed
tongue-in-cheek to send American rattlesnakes to England in exchange.)
He was visiting Lord Le Despencer when a servant brought to the
breakfast table the newspaper which had printed the “Edict” hoax. A
fellow guest named Paul Whitehead read the first paragraphs and
exploded:
“Here’s the King of Prussia claiming a right to this kingdom.... I dare
say we shall hear by next post that he is upon his march with one
hundred thousand men to back this.”
Franklin kept a straight face. Whitehead read on until, as absurdities
piled up, it dawned on him that he had been taken:
“I’ll be hanged, Franklin, if this is not some of your American jokes
upon us.”
They admitted he had made his point very cleverly and all had a good
laugh.
But neither the “Rules” nor the “Edict” persuaded Parliament and the
ministry to change their ways. Colonial resentment focused on the tax on
tea, which small as it was, remained a “splinter in the unhealed wound.”
In Boston, on December 16, 1773, fifty citizens, dressed as Mohawk
Indians, defiantly dumped 342 chests of British tea into the ocean.
Parliament, when the news reached London, acted swiftly. Until
restitution was made for the tea, the port of Boston was to be closed.
Four more regiments under General Thomas Gage were sent to keep order.
Boston became an occupied city, unable to conduct its commerce and faced
with financial ruin.
Pay for the tea, Franklin urged his Boston colleagues. The Boston Tea
Party was an act of lawlessness which could only harm the cause of the
colonies. Just as the colonists were unaware of the problems that faced
him daily in England, so he was too far away to appreciate the fire of
indignation that was sweeping America.
In the meantime a scandal had erupted in London as a result of the
publication of Governor Hutchinson’s letters. Two gentlemen, William
Whately and John Temple, had each accused the other of making the
letters public. They carried the argument to the newspapers, and then
Temple challenged Whately to a duel. It was fought at Hyde Park on
December 11, with pistols and swords. Whately was wounded. Neither party
was satisfied.
Franklin was out of town when the duel took place. After he heard about
it, he realized what he had to do. On Christmas Day, a letter signed by
him appeared in the _Public Advertiser_, which said that both Whately
and Temple were “ignorant and innocent” of the publication of the
Hutchinson letters, that he was the one who had obtained them and sent
them to Boston. The entire blame was his. He did not give the name of
the man who had turned the letters over to him. This secret he carried
to his grave.
How many high-placed persons in England were waiting to get something on
this imperturbable Philadelphian! How many resented the way, like
Socrates’ gadfly, he forced them to admit what they did not want to
admit, and pestered them eternally with his troublesome colonies. Now
they would have their revenge. Franklin knew his admission would bring
wrath on his head. He had not long to wait.
On January 29, 1774, he was summoned to the Cockpit Tavern, to a meeting
of the King’s Privy Council for Plantation Affairs. The subject given
was the petition of the Massachusetts Assembly for the removal from
office of Andrew Oliver and Governor Hutchinson. Franklin’s friends had
informed him already that the petition was to be denied. There were even
rumors that his papers might be seized and himself thrown in prison. He
was prepared for the worst.
He arrived on time, dressed in a suit of figured Manchester velvet,
wearing an old-fashioned curled wig, and carrying the same cane with
which he had once quieted the ripples on the stream at Lord Shelburne’s
estate.
Thirty-six members of the Privy Council were seated around a large
table. Among them were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of
London, the Duke of Queensberry, Lord Dartmouth, whom he had found
sympathetic; Lord Hillsborough, who hated and feared him; and the Earl
of Sandwich (from whom the word “sandwich” was derived); the London head
of the post office, a conceited individual who disliked everything that
Franklin stood for. Among them, Franklin could be positive of only one
friend—Lord Le Despencer.
A few spectators had been admitted, including Joseph Priestley, the
scientist, and Edmund Burke, the Irish peer. They stood behind the table
since there were no extra chairs. No one offered Franklin a chair
either. For the entire hearing he stood by the fireplace, facing the
councilors.
It opened with a reading of the Massachusetts petition and of the
Hutchinson and Oliver letters. Franklin’s lawyer, John Dunning, appealed
to the King’s “wisdom and goodness” to favor the petition and remove the
two men from their posts, as a gesture to quiet colonial unrest. Then
Alexander Wedderburn, lawyer for Hutchinson, took over.
His speech, which lasted an hour, was from beginning to end a tirade
against Franklin. Franklin could have got hold of the controversial
letters only by fraudulent or corrupt means, he said. His own letter,
clearing Whately and Temple of blame, was “impossible to read without
horror.” Franklin was “a receiver of goods dishonorably come by.” He had
duped the “innocent, well-meaning farmers” of the Massachusetts
Assembly.
Wedderburn’s accusations grew wilder as he warmed to his subject.
Franklin wanted to become governor himself, he stated categorically.
That was why he had taken on himself “to furnish materials for
dissensions; to set at variance the different branches of the
legislature; and to irritate and incense the minds of the King’s
subjects against the King’s governor.”
While Wedderburn continued to spew forth his poisonous invective,
Franklin stood stoically, his face impassive, seemingly unaware either
of the triumphal smirks of his enemies or the compassionate glances of
his friends. People agreed later that his silence, in face of the
screams of his adversary, showed him the stronger man. When the hearing
was over, he went quietly home alone.
He made no answer to Wedderburn, nor even to those closest to him did he
indicate that the attack rankled. To Thomas Cushing he wrote, “Splashes
of dirt thrown upon my character I suffered while fresh to remain. I did
not choose to spread by endeavouring to remove them, but relied on the
vulgar adage that they would all rub off when they were dry.”
The day after the hearing he was notified of his dismissal as deputy
postmaster-general of the colonies. This was a severe blow, for he had
prided himself on the efficient work he had done in this service. Then,
on February 7, 1774, the King formally rejected the Massachusetts
Assembly petition to remove Hutchinson and Oliver.
Seemingly Franklin’s usefulness as a provincial agent was ended. He
thought of going home but decided against it. Critical days were ahead.
He felt he might still, in spite of his disgrace, find ways of helping
his country.
Except that he had no direct dealings with the ministry or Parliament,
his life went on as before. He discussed scientific matters with Joseph
Priestley, among them the phenomenon of marsh gas. When Polly Hewson’s
husband died, leaving her with three children, he grieved with and for
her. He worried lest William be removed from the governorship of New
Jersey as further punishment to him, but this did not happen.
In September 1774, a dark-haired youngish man, who spoke in the Quaker
manner, paid him a visit. His name was Thomas Paine, he said. He was
fascinated by Franklin’s work in electricity and gave evidence of being
well informed himself on scientific matters. He had also done a bit of
writing, particularly a quite eloquent petition to Parliament on the
plight of the excisemen, a petition that had cost him his own job in the
excise service.
He had a dream of going to America, Paine confided. Would Dr. Franklin
be good enough to give him some advice?
Franklin rarely refused such requests. In this case, he was sufficiently
impressed to write a note of recommendation to his son-in-law Richard
Bache. He could not guess the enormous favor he was doing his homeland
by sending Thomas Paine to America’s shores.
Massachusetts had rejected Franklin’s advice to pay for the Boston Tea
Party. Other colonies were coming to the rescue of beleaguered Boston.
Connecticut sent flocks of sheep. From Virginia came flour. South
Carolina gave rice. Franklin was delighted; at last the colonies were
helping each other, nearly twenty years after he had proposed a union at
the Albany conference.
When the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in May 1774, he
was full of praise for “the coolness, temper, and firmness of the
American proceedings,” and he was all in favor of a strong boycott of
British manufacturers. “If America would save for three or four years
the money she spends in fashions and fineries and fopperies of this
country she might buy the whole Parliament, ministers and all.”
At last his beloved colonies were learning the value of concerted and
dignified action, so much more effective, in his thinking, than mob
actions.
As the crisis deepened, one by one important statesmen sought him out
and almost humbly asked his advice as to what they should do. The great
William Pitt summoned him in August. Did he think the colonists would go
as far as to ask for independence? Franklin assured him, truthfully,
that he “never had heard in any conversation, from any person drunk or
sober, the least expression of a wish for a separation or hint that such
a thing would be advantageous to America.”
He received an invitation to play chess with the sister of Admiral Lord
Richard Howe. At their second session, Miss Howe pressed him to tell her
what should be done to settle the dispute between Great Britain and the
colonies. “They should kiss and be friends,” he said lightly. Nor would
he be more explicit when she brought Admiral Lord Howe to talk with him.
In his heart he knew it was now too late to repair the many blunders on
the part of Parliament and the King.
On December 18, 1774, he received the Declaration of Rights and
Grievances, a petition from the First Continental Congress to George
III. The King, who was having the first of those attacks which would end
in insanity, ignored it completely. With William Pitt, Admiral Lord
Howe, and other of the more reasonable officials, Franklin spent long
hours trying to work out a compromise that would keep the peace. It was
all in vain.
In the midst of these labors, word reached him that his faithful Debby
had died of a stroke on December 19—the day after the arrival of the
petition.
There would be no more of her warm and loving and atrociously spelled
letters to keep him informed about his relatives: “I donte know wuther
you have bin told that Cosin Benney Mecome and his Lovely wife and five
Dafters is come here to live and work Jurney worke I had them to Dine
and drink tee yisterday....”
Or to lament the lack of news from him: “I have bin verey much distrest
a bout [you] as I did not [get] oney letter nor one word from you nor
did I hear one word from oney bodey that you wrote to so I muste submit
and indever to submit to what I am to bair.”
Letters which she might sign “Your afeckshonet wife,” or when she was
less careful “Your ffeckshonot wife.” He would miss them, but above all
he would miss the assurance that she was there waiting for him, loyal
and cheerful, to greet him whenever he returned from his long voyage.
He stayed on in England only a few months longer. His last day in London
he spent with Joseph Priestley. Together they read papers from America,
and now and then tears ran down Franklin’s cheeks. He was sure America
would win if there were a war, he told Priestley, but it would take at
least ten years.
On March 25, 1775, he and his grandson Temple embarked on the
_Pennsylvania Packet_. The crossing took six weeks and the weather was
pleasant. In the first half of it, he wrote out the complicated story of
his recent dealings with the ministry in his last futile and desperate
efforts to prevent war. The last part of the journey he devoted to
studying the nature of the Gulf Stream, taking its temperature two to
four times a day, and noting that its water had a special color of its
own and “that it does not sparkle in the night.”
Thus he was able to enjoy a brief interlude in the world of nature
between the bitter disputes he left behind and the struggle that lay
ahead.
12
BEGINNING OF A LONG WAR
He reached Philadelphia on May 5, 1775—an elderly widower, nearly
seventy, grave and saddened by the loss of his wife, by the crisis to
his country which his many years of negotiations could not forestall.
Sally and Richard Bache took him to the house on Market Street which he
had designed but never occupied. Two small grandchildren whom he had
never seen, Benjamin and William Bache, were waiting to embrace him and
to greet their youthful English cousin, Temple. Franklin’s friends of
the Junto and political companions were on hand to give him the big
news.
On April 19, while he was on the high seas, that was when it had
happened. General Sir William Howe (another brother of the chess-playing
Miss Howe), who was now stationed in Boston, had sent some 800 British
soldiers to Concord, where the Massachusetts Committee of Safety had a
store of arms and ammunition. The Massachusetts Minutemen, forewarned by
Paul Revere, had tried to stop them at Lexington. The Redcoats, who
claimed that the colonials fired first, had killed eight and left ten
wounded, then pushed onwards. It was at Concord where for the first time
in America the King’s subjects shot at the King’s troops. The return of
the Redcoats was a rout, with farmers and tradesmen firing behind every
barn and haystack. General Howe announced 73 of his men slain and 174
wounded.
A rebellion was under way and there was no turning back.
On his second day home, Franklin was chosen as a Pennsylvania delegate
to the Second Continental Congress. It opened on May 10 in the
Philadelphia State House; delegates from all the colonies attended. In
both years and experience, Franklin was the senior member.
Colonel George Washington, a big quiet man of forty-three, wore his
colonial uniform, as if guessing the heavy responsibility ahead of him
as Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Armies. On the day he left for
Cambridge to assume his post, word came of the valiant fight at Breed
Hill (which history would call the Battle of Bunker Hill). Another tall
Virginian joined the Congress, red-haired Thomas Jefferson, thirty-two
years old, lawyer and college graduate and of a wealthy and cultured
family. In spite of differences in age and background, Franklin found
him a kindred spirit. Jefferson, like himself, was a scientist,
inventor, man of letters.
In July, Congress voted to send another petition to their “gracious
sovereign,” asking for a redress of grievances. Franklin knew in advance
that this “olive branch” petition was a waste of paper, but he did not
voice his objections. Let these impulsive young men of Congress find out
for themselves that the weak and stubborn George III was not on their
side. They would likely not have taken his word anyway.
In sessions of Congress he spoke less than any man present. In his
school days he had learned a jingle: “A man of words and not of deeds /
Is like a garden full of weeds.” Better to show one’s patriotism in
action than talk.
Congress did its work largely by committees. Franklin served on a
committee for the making of paper money, on committees to protect colony
trade, to investigate lead ore deposits, and to study the cheapest and
easiest way to procure salt. He was on another committee which
considered, and turned down, a reconciliation plan submitted by Lord
North. He was one of three commissioners appointed to handle Indian
affairs in Pennsylvania and Virginia.
On July 25, the Congress voted him postmaster-general of the colonies.
The postal system which he set up with his son-in-law Richard Bache was
so efficient and comprehensive that it served as a model to modern
times, giving Franklin right to the title, “Father of the American Post
Office.”
For local defense, the Pennsylvania Assembly set up a Committee of
Safety, appointing Franklin as president. Among his duties were the
reorganizing of the Philadelphia militia, selecting officers for armed
boats, obtaining medicines for the soldiers. He designed a special
pike—a long wooden pole with pointed metal head—to be used in
hand-to-hand fighting as a substitute for bayonets, which the colonists
did not have. Half-seriously, he proposed use of bows and arrows, in
lieu of more powerful weapons. To keep British warships from coming
within firing range of Philadelphia, he had built huge contraptions of
logs and iron, called _Chevaux de Frise_, to be sunk in the Delaware
River.
On his papers and plans he worked late night after night. He met with
the Committee of Safety at six each morning. From nine to four he sat in
Congress. It was small wonder that delegate John Adams would catch him
napping during the hot and often wearisome sessions. No one knows how he
found time for his postmaster duties.
Could anything more be expected of old Ben Franklin who twenty-eight
years before had decided to retire, since he had enough money to live
on, and no man needed more than enough? In all those years he had
continued to work for his city, his province, the thirteen colonies. His
greatest services still lay ahead.
He was sure America would win—eventually. He had no illusions about the
hardships involved. England was the most powerful country in the world,
swollen with the glory of its victories over France and Spain. Its
superb navy was rivaled by none. Its army was well-trained, well-armed,
disciplined, and numerous. The Americans had to start from scratch.
The embargo against English goods had boomeranged sadly. America was
still an agricultural country with little manufacturing of its own.
There were shortages of necessities and of luxuries. That year Abigail
Adams sent a tearful request to her husband, John, to buy her a box of
pins in Philadelphia—even if it cost ten dollars.
The most urgent need was for arms and ammunition. From General
Washington at Cambridge came letter after letter, pleading for them. One
note, confessing that he had no more than half a pound of gunpowder per
soldier, fell into the hands of General Howe—who thought it was a trick.
(It was not until March 1776 that Henry Knox brought down guns captured
at Ticonderoga and Washington could frighten Howe and his troops from
Boston.)
One of Franklin’s many Congressional committees was formed to promote
the manufacture of saltpeter for gunpowder. Progress was slow.
Throughout the war, the colonies produced only about fifty tons of
gunpowder. Obviously home manufacture was not the answer.
In July, Congress had a visitor from Bermuda, Colonel Henry Tucker, who
headed the island’s local militia. Tucker was sympathetic to the
Americans as were many Bermudians. There was for a time talk of Bermuda
being the fourteenth colony to revolt against British domination. It had
previously been dependent on America for foodstuffs, but as it was a
British possession shipments had been stopped. Colonel Tucker had come
to plead that the ban be lifted.
Franklin found occasion to talk with Tucker privately and one thing the
Bermudian told him interested him greatly. At the Royal Arsenal at St.
George, there was a large stock of gunpowder—and no guard.
On Franklin’s recommendation, Congress put through a blanket order to
exchange food for guns with any vessel arriving on the American coast,
an order which evaded the controversial point of trading with an enemy.
Bermuda was promised not only food, but candles, soap and lumber. There
was another deal with Colonel Tucker, about which only those intimately
concerned were informed.
In August, two ships set sail for Bermuda—the _Lady Catherine_ from
Virginia and the _Savannah Pacquet_ from South Carolina. At Mangrove
Bay, their crews disembarked, to be welcomed by friendly Bermudians,
including the son of Colonel Tucker. Bermudians and American seamen
boarded small boats and sailed along the coast to St. George, where, on
the estate of Bermuda’s Governor James Bruere, the Royal Arsenal was
located.
The raiders waited until the governor, his fourteen children, and his
numerous watchdogs were all asleep. They proceeded so stealthily that
not even a dog was wakened. A sailor, lowered into the arsenal through a
vent in the roof, unlocked the doors from inside. Barrels of powder were
rolled to the waiting boats. Then the party took off.
Twelve days later the _Lady Catherine_ arrived at Philadelphia with
1,800 pounds of gunpowder, while the _Savannah Pacquet_ delivered its
cargo at Charleston.
This was Franklin’s first victory in his battle for ammunition. Although
Governor Bruere, on discovering his loss, promptly sent for British
warships to patrol the island, Bermudian sloops continued to get through
to America, and American ships managed regularly to maneuver around the
patrol. The trade continued for the benefit of both Americans and
Bermudians.
In the midst of this hectic summer, Franklin spent one long and
miserable evening with William, the son whom he had made part of his
life as much as any father ever had. He had hoped his flesh and blood
would share his burning indignation at English oppression. The most
bitter disillusion of his life now faced him. The governor of New Jersey
haughtily denied any sympathy for the “American rabble.” His loyalty was
to the Crown, and that was that.
Franklin continued to write affectionately to Temple, who had gone to
stay with his father, but the breach between him and his first-born son
remained deep.
The Bermuda raid was Franklin’s first step toward a larger plan. The
Secret Committee to further importation of war supplies was set up on
September 18, 1775. Among those serving with him was Robert Morris, the
prosperous merchant who became the financial genius of the American
Revolution. The Committee was granted substantial sums of money and wide
powers. It made contracts with American merchants who, with permits
issued by Congress, took cargoes to the West Indies, Martinique, Santo
Domingo, and even Europe, bringing back arms and ammunition.
Part of the Committee’s work was to get in touch with merchants from
many countries. England was no exception. The friendships Franklin had
formed among English merchants when he was seeking repeal of the Stamp
Act now proved their value. These merchants knew they could trust him
and were not adverse to giving a helping hand to the Americans and
making a profit at the same time.
There was in the West Indies a tiny island no more than seven or eight
miles square called St. Eustatius, a dependency of Holland and an
international free port. Statia, as the Americans called it, had long
been a market for smuggled goods from every corner of the globe. Now it
became an arsenal to which merchants from Holland, France, England, and
other nations brought war materials to be picked up by American vessels.
The British government, through its excellent espionage system, knew
what was happening but could not prevent it.
“Powder cruises,” these ventures were called. They were only one phase
of American sea activity. There was in time a Continental Navy, which
was never very effective. Individual colonies had their own navies.
There were also the romantic privateers, privately owned vessels with
commissions from Congress, which by the first twenty months of the war
had captured over 700 English vessels—and made fortunes for their owners
and crews. The powder cruises alone were planned for the sole purpose of
getting war materials for the fighting forces.
They were a long-range project. It took time to fit and man and load the
ships, more time for them to make their journeys and return. Not for two
years would the Americans have enough ammunition to win a major
engagement. Before this happened, there were hard days ahead.
On October 4, Franklin rode off to visit Washington’s camp at Cambridge,
on a Congressional mission with Thomas Lynch of South Carolina and
Benjamin Harrison of Virginia. If he was a little flabbergasted at the
motley assembly of backwoodsmen, farmers and teenage youths to whom
Washington was trying to teach military discipline, he did not say so.
These were his people. He was proud of them and what they had set out to
do.
On his return, he stopped in Warwick, Rhode Island, where his sister
Jane Mecom, an old woman now, had taken refuge from British-occupied
Boston with their old friends, the Greenes. Besides himself, she was the
only one of Josiah Franklin’s seventeen children who was still living.
Happily, she did not yet know that her Boston home was being looted in
her absence.
“Sorrows roll over me like the waves of the sea,” she had written
Franklin a few years before on the death of her adored daughter Polly.
She was worried now about her son Benjamin, who was unable to hold a job
and whose wife and children were destitute (the same whom Debby had
written her husband that she had had to tea). Only a few months later,
his mind completely gone, Benjamin wandered out in the dark, never to be
seen again.
In spite of the repeated blows of a cruel fate, Jane had remained
warmhearted and thoughtful. Franklin, who had the tenderest affection
for her, brought her back to Philadelphia, where she stayed with him for
the next year. Always he had humored her, given her and her inevitably
needy family material help, written her long and loving letters—and
occasionally fretted at her constant solicitude.
On this same trip he distributed a hundred pounds, sent by English
friends to aid the wounded of Lexington and Concord and the widows and
orphans of those who had been killed. It is possible that one of the
generous donors was Joseph Priestley, to whom Franklin wrote about this
time:
“Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed one hundred and
fifty Yankees in this campaign, which is twenty thousand pounds a
head.... During the same time sixty thousand children have been born in
America.”
His letter was quoted throughout England, where the hearts of many lay
not with their own corrupt Parliament, but with those who had the
courage to oppose it.
13
THE SPLENDID WORD INDEPENDENCE
As Franklin had foreseen, the King paid no heed to the “olive branch”
petition of the Second Continental Congress. By Royal proclamation all
Americans were declared Rebels. The British had burned Charlestown in
June and Falmouth in October 1775. It was hinted they were buying
mercenaries from German princes. That foreigners should be paid by the
English to kill English subjects seemed the greatest insult of all.
Franklin composed a short letter to William Strahan, his English printer
friend:
Mr. Strahan:
You are a member of Parliament, and one of that majority which has
doomed my country to destruction. You have begun to burn our towns and
murder our people. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the
blood of your relations. You and I were long friends. You are now my
enemy, and I am
Yours,
B. Franklin.
He did not send this cruel note, but instead wrote Strahan a warm and
cordial letter which Strahan answered in kind. Perhaps he had written
the first one to see how it sounded and when he read it over did not
like it. Throughout the conflict he found ways of carrying on a
correspondence with those he cherished in England.
On November 29, 1775, the Congressional Committee of Secret
Correspondence was formed with five members—Benjamin Franklin and John
Dickinson of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Harrison of Virginia, Thomas Johnson
of Maryland, and John Jay of New York. Its assignment was to establish
closer relations with foreign nations, and where possible to make allies
of those nations. With these duties, the Committee of Secret
Correspondence became the predecessor of the United States Department of
State.
As a member of the new committee, Franklin wrote his friend Charles
Dumas, a Swiss journalist with many political connections: “We wish to
know whether, if, as seems likely to happen, we should be obliged to
break off all connection with Britain, and declare ourselves an
independent people, there is any state or power in Europe, who would be
willing to enter into an alliance with us for the benefits of our
commerce.” In a similar vein he sounded out Barbeu Dubourg, his Paris
printer, who had, as he knew, friends high in the French government.
The French were already watching America with interest. The harsh terms
of the 1763 treaty with Great Britain still rankled. They welcomed any
struggle that would involve England’s military forces, particularly if
it could be prolonged to seriously weaken her.
In December 1775, a certain Monsieur Achard de Bonvouloir, allegedly an
Antwerp merchant, arrived in Philadelphia. Through a French bookseller
he arranged to meet Franklin, to whom he admitted that he had
connections at the Court of Versailles. In truth he was a French agent,
sent by Louis XVI’s foreign minister, Count Charles Gravier de
Vergennes, to appraise the American situation.
Franklin arranged for Bonvouloir to meet with the Committee of Secret
Correspondence at a quiet house in the outskirts of Philadelphia. It
turned out to be a very crucial meeting. The French government did not
object to American ships coming into her ports to pick up cargoes,
Bonvouloir said. If the British complained of the presence of these
ships as a breach of neutrality, the government would simply plead
ignorance of what was going on. But in return for this welcome assurance
of free trade, the French wanted to make sure that America intended to
declare its independence from England.
Independence was a word as yet heard rarely. Though Franklin had
mentioned its possibility in his letter to Dumas, he knew that few other
members of Congress, much less the American people, were ready for such
a drastic step. The urgent need for French cooperation made him speak
out boldly.
Certainly the Americans were going to separate from England, he told
Bonvouloir blandly. The country was behind the war to a man. Everything
was going splendidly. General Washington’s army was growing.
There was exaggeration in his statements. Not only was talk of
independence rare, but America was peppered with Loyalists, those who,
like Franklin’s own son, were opposed to action against the British
Crown. While new recruits were joining Washington, many simply walked
off when their time of service was up, and some were deserting outright.
But Franklin’s words were a magnificent prophecy. He was speaking from
his own profound faith in his countrymen, and his confidence was
contagious. Bonvouloir sent back a glowing report to the French minister
Vergennes; France’s secret alliance with America began from that time.
If Americans were not more solidly behind the rebellion, it was that
their emotions had not been deeply aroused. Was not the chief dispute a
matter of taxes? No one likes to pay taxes, but though people were ready
to parade and protest against them, not all were willing to risk their
lives rather than pay them. It took the protégé of Franklin, Thomas
Paine, to point out that the rebellion was for something much more
important than taxes.
Paine had settled in Philadelphia, taken a job with the _Pennsylvania
Magazine_, and had, in the few months he had been in America, written
some fine articles, among them one of the first attacks on slavery to
appear in the American press. Franklin saw him in October and proposed
that he write “a history of the present transactions,” an account of
events that had led to the present crisis. Paine had only looked
mysterious, saying that he was working on something.
Then in January 1776, Franklin received the first copy off the press of
a pamphlet titled “Common Sense.” Though it was published anonymously,
“written by an Englishman,” he guessed easily who had written it.
“Common Sense,” written simply and clearly, was a passioned and reasoned
plea for secession from England. It showed Americans how much they had
to gain from independence and how little there was to lose. It made them
hold up their heads with the pride of being American and convinced them
they were fighting for the most precious thing in the world—their
freedom. There is no estimating the enormous service done by “Common
Sense” in uniting the colonies in a common cause.
In February, Franklin sent in his resignation to the Pennsylvania
Assembly and its Committee of Safety: “Aged as I am, I feel myself
unequal to do so much business....” At the same time he accepted another
arduous assignment from Congress, to head a delegation to Canada to try
and win French Canadians to the side of the colonies.
Two expeditions had already been sent to wrest Quebec from the British,
one under General Richard Montgomery, the other under Colonel Benedict
Arnold. Both had failed. Montgomery had been killed. Arnold, severely
wounded, had retreated with his battered army to Montreal.
Franklin, aged seventy, set out on his mission the last week of March
1776. There were stops in New York, Albany, and in Saratoga where the
snow was still six inches deep. From there they rode horseback across to
the Hudson and proceeded up the river in rowboats to Fort Edward. “I
began to apprehend that I have undertaken a fatigue that at my time of
life may prove too much for me,” Franklin wrote Josiah Quincy.
They sailed along the coast of Lake George in open flatboats, fighting
their way through ice. When the cold grew too bitter, they stopped to
make fires, thaw out, and brew tea. By April 25 they had reached Lake
Champlain, and in clumsy wagons drove over bad roads to the St.
Lawrence, where they again took to boats. Their hard journey ended at
Montreal on the 29th. Benedict Arnold, now a general, came to meet them,
and there was a cannon salute to the “Committee of the Honourable
Continental Congress,” and to the “celebrated Dr. Franklin.”
The conferences the next day proved what Franklin had doubtless
suspected. The Canadians for the most part found British rule preferable
to French rule and were not dissatisfied. The majority were Catholic and
as such hostile to the colonies because of unpleasant things that had
been said about their faith.
General Arnold and his men were penniless. Franklin loaned them about
350 pounds of his own money in gold. On May 6, word came that the
British were sending reinforcements from England. Franklin guessed that
the Americans would be driven from Canada; it happened just a month
later. He stayed on until May 11, then, realizing nothing more could be
done, set out for home.
He was in New York by the 27th, as worn out and ill as though the vain
mission had drained the last bit of his strength. His health returned
slowly. From Philadelphia, on June 21, he wrote Washington that gout had
kept him from “Congress and company”—that he knew little of what had
passed except that “a declaration of independence was in the making.”
To this development, the magic of “Common Sense” deserved credit. On
April 12, North Carolina had instructed its delegates to Congress to
vote for independence. Other colonies followed suit. On June 7, Richard
Henry Lee introduced a resolution that “these colonies are, and of a
right ought to be, free and independent states.” Three days later
Congress appointed Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Robert Livingston of
New York, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Benjamin Franklin, as a
committee to prepare the declaration.
Jefferson produced the first draft. John Adams and Franklin made only a
few alterations before it was submitted to Congress on June 18.
Congress nearly drove the Committee out of its mind with demands for
extensive changes. One clause which attacked slavery was deleted
altogether. When nerves grew tense, Franklin told a story.
There was a hatter he had once known who built a handsome signboard
reading, “John Thompson, hatter, makes and sells hats for some ready
money,” adorned with a picture of a hat. He submitted it to his friends
for approval. One thought the word “hatter” unnecessary. Another that
“makes” was not needed. A third thought “for ready money” useless, since
no one then sold for credit. His next friend insisted “sells hats” be
omitted; no one expected him to give them away. All that was left, when
his friends were through with him, was his name “John Thompson” and the
drawing of the hat.
The moral lesson implied may have speeded up the Congressional process.
At length, the Declaration met with approval. John Hancock, in big black
writing, affixed his signature first. According to legend, Hancock said,
“We must be unanimous; there must be no pulling different ways; we must
all hang together.” To which Franklin allegedly replied, “We must indeed
all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
The ideas in the Declaration were not new. Many of them had been said by
others, specifically by Thomas Paine, in phraseology not too different
from Jefferson’s. The document, adopted by Congress on July 4, 1776,
remained the greatest charter of freedom of all time.
In the midst of the wonder of independence, the New Jersey Assembly
ordered the arrest of its governor, William Franklin, as a Loyalist,
another sad blow for his father. He was first held under guard at his
home, then taken to Connecticut, where he was kept for two years in the
Litchfield jail or on parole. Temple came to live with his grandfather,
attending the Pennsylvania Academy which Franklin had started so many
years before.
The Declaration of Independence, splendid as it was, still was only
words on paper. The reality was far in the future and the present looked
very dark.
On and around Long Island was gathered the greatest British
expeditionary force in history. Some 32,000 men (including German
mercenaries whom the Americans called Hessians) and 500 vessels were
there in command of General Sir William Howe who, after leaving Boston,
had gone to Halifax for reinforcements. And in the harbor, a mighty
fleet under his brother Admiral Lord Richard Howe. And in Manhattan,
General George Washington with less than half as many men, ill-clad and
hungry and a good portion too sick to fight.
To get a foothold on Long Island, Washington took half his army to
Brooklyn Heights. The results were disastrous—a surprise attack by the
British on August 27, brought American casualties, killed and wounded,
to nearly two thousand. It was to the credit of Washington, and John
Glover’s Marbleheaders and former Salem sailors, that boats were found
to carry the survivors back to Manhattan under the cloak of night.
Why did not the Howe brothers pursue them then and there? They needed
only to send a force up the Hudson or Long Island Sound to trap the
Rebels and cut to pieces America’s principal army. Yet they dawdled a
while. Why?
The truth was that Admiral Lord Howe, whom Franklin had first met at the
home of his sister, had come in a dual role of warrior and peace
ambassador. He was empowered to offer full pardon to all Rebels (with
the secret exception of John Adams) and on his arrival had sent Franklin
a flattering and friendly letter making a proposal for
reconciliation—which Franklin, with the sanction of Congress, had turned
down in an equally cordial missive.
Soon after the Battle of Long Island, Lord Howe sent another request to
Philadelphia, by a paroled prisoner, General John Sullivan, for
delegates to come and discuss a settlement of hostilities. Franklin,
John Adams, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina were chosen. They met
Lord Howe and his staff on September 11, at a neglected house on Staten
Island, in a room hung with moss and branches. Americans and British
dined on cold ham, tongue, mutton, bread, and claret, all the while
making polite conversation. Then they got to business. Lord Howe did
most of the talking.
He felt for America as for a brother, he said, and should lament, as a
brother, should America fall.
“My Lord, we will use our utmost endeavors to save your lordship that
mortification,” Franklin said with a guileless smile.
“The King’s most earnest desire” was to make his American subjects
happy, Howe continued. They would redress any real grievances. It was
not money they wanted. America’s solid advantage to Great Britain was
“her commerce, her strength, her men.”
“Aye, my Lord,” Franklin said, chuckling, “we have a pretty considerable
manufactory of men.” He was referring not, as Howe’s secretary presumed,
to the growing army, but to America’s rapidly increasing population.
Howe continued to plead for a resumption of the old relationship with
England. Franklin told him firmly that was impossible. Had not their
defenseless towns been burned in the midst of winter, Indians encouraged
to massacre their farmers, and slaves to murder their masters—and now
foreign mercenaries brought to deluge their settlements with blood? Ah
no, after these atrocious injuries, there could be no return to their
previous status.
The conference ended on this impasse.
Following this meeting, the British drove Washington north to Harlem
Heights and on to White Plains. During the evacuation, New York caught
fire and a third of it burned. No one ever knew who was responsible. The
situation looked hopeless—unless substantial aid could be had from
outside. And where could they go for such aid if not to France?
Congress chose three commissioners to represent America at the French
court—Jefferson, Franklin, and Silas Deane of Connecticut, who was
already in Paris. When Jefferson declined because of his wife’s health,
Arthur Lee, cousin of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee of Virginia, was chosen in
his place.
Before he left, Franklin appointed Richard Bache as deputy postmaster
and turned over to Congress all the money he could raise as a
loan—around 4,000 pounds. To his friend Joseph Galloway, he entrusted
his trunk, containing his correspondence from the years he had spent in
England, as well as the only existing manuscript of his _Autobiography_.
He took with him two grandsons, eighteen-year-old Temple Franklin, and
Benjamin Franklin Bache, age seven. They left on the sloop _Reprisal_,
October 27, 1776.
Did the two youths know what a perilous journey they were making, with
the English Navy prowling the seas in search of just such prizes as the
_Reprisal_? Temple at least must have realized that if they were
captured, his gray-haired grandfather would be considered a prize more
valuable than any ship, and would certainly be hanged as a traitor. Not
only was the crossing made safely but within two days of landing, the
passengers had the thrill of witnessing their captain take two British
“prizes,” which the _Reprisal_ on December 3 brought to Auray on the
coast of Brittany.
14
FRANCE FALLS IN LOVE WITH AN AMERICAN
“The carriage was a miserable one,” Franklin wrote of the trip from
Auray to the French town of Nantes, where the _Reprisal_ would have
brought them had it not been for the two prizes. “With tired horses, the
evening dark, scarce a traveler but ourselves on the road; and, to make
it more comfortable, the driver stopped near a wood we were to pass
through, to tell us that a gang of eighteen robbers infested that wood
who but two weeks ago had murdered some travelers on that very spot.”
The Nantes townspeople were expecting the celebrated American and were
waiting to greet him as he descended from his carriage.
Instead of a curled and powdered wig, he wore a fur cap over his thin
gray straight hair, which he had adopted on shipboard for reasons of
comfort. His costume was of brown homespun worsted, with white stockings
and buckled shoes. He wore spectacles, because at seventy vanity was
less important to him than seeing clearly. He carried a plain crabtree
cane, such as any man could have cut for himself.
“A _primitive_!” people exclaimed. His simple attire delighted them all.
For his few days in Nantes he stayed with a commercial agent, Monsieur
Gruet. A string of visitors appeared afternoon and evenings to pay their
respects. He spoke little, knowing his French was imperfect, and his
silence made him seem all the wiser. Everyone was filled with
admiration. The women of the town paid him their greatest tribute in a
_Coiffure à la Franklin_, dressing their hair in a high curly mass to
resemble his fur cap.
His welcome at Nantes was only a preview of what attended him in Paris.
His printer, Barbeu Dubourg, had prepared the populace by distributing
circulars about his visit. For two days before his arrival, he was the
sole subject of conversation in Paris cafés. Wherever he went, admiring
citizens surrounded him, remarking on the simplicity of his costume and
his unaffected manners. Silas Deane, who had received no such attention
on his arrival, was amazed. But then, Deane had little love for the
French people, had made no effort to learn their language, and was
obviously unhappy in this foreign environment.
From Deane, Franklin learned of a plan already under way to help
America. A dummy exporting house had been set up under the name of
Hortalez and Company, to which the French and Spanish governments had
each contributed a million livres. (The livre is replaced by the franc
in modern French currency.) When Deane had reached Paris a few months
before, authorized to buy supplies, Foreign Minister Vergennes had
promptly sent him to the head of Hortalez, a dashing adventurer named
Caron de Beaumarchais (who would later become known for his librettos of
_The Marriage of Figaro_ and _The Barber of Séville_). The company was
now arranging to send arms and ammunition, uniforms, everything the
colonies needed.
Since this was Deane’s project, Franklin did not interfere. Later, when
Americans found they were receiving inferior goods from Hortalez, when
Congress was billed for what they were told was a gift, when
Beaumarchais unaccountably became wealthy, and even Deane was accused of
dishonesty, he may have wished that he had kept a closer check. For the
moment, he had plenty of other work to do.
Silas Deane as well as Arthur Lee, the third commissioner, both gave him
advice on how to conduct himself. Deane, a blunt and tactless man, was
all for forcing the issue with France. Arthur Lee, who had an intriguing
nature, advocated a devious approach. Franklin listened attentively to
both of them and went his own way.
On December 28, he and Deane were received at Versailles by Vergennes,
of whom Franklin had already heard so much. As usual, he wore his brown
worsted suit and his head was bare, with no wig to hide his gray locks.
Though he did little more than transmit expressions of good will and
gratitude from his country, the suave and polished French diplomat
summed him up as a great and good man. Henceforth, whenever possible,
Vergennes avoided dealing with any American other than Benjamin
Franklin.
The next night he attended a soiree held by Madame la Marquise du
Deffand. Her guests were the most important personages in Europe. The
Marquise was known to be strongly pro-British. Everyone expected that
Monsieur Franklin from Philadelphia would be put in his place. How could
he compete in this brilliant company? He was much too clever to try. All
evening he sat quietly smiling, waiting for others to do the talking,
listening with interest to everything that was said, even by the ladies.
The company was enchanted. They had believed all Americans to be bold
and rude-mannered and self-assertive. This Monsieur Franklin, who
dressed like a Quaker, was a sage, a patriarch! They had never known
anyone like him. From then on, the aristocracy gave him their adoration,
as did the scientific world and the common people.
A few days later there was a gift of two million livres, not connected
with the funds at Hortalez, presented for the American cause in the name
of the French King. Franklin had, without resort to bullying or
conniving, scored his first victory in French diplomacy.
For fear of British retaliation, Vergennes dared not openly sponsor him.
Privately he was doing all in his power to convince Louis XVI that the
American rebellion, even though against another king, should be
supported to the hilt. This was not easy, for the French ruler was not
yet ready to show more than a token interest in the Americans. Franklin
understood Vergennes’ position and did not press him for what he had
really come to get, an open alliance. His most important task, from
Vergennes’ viewpoint, was to win French public opinion to his side. This
he did without half trying.
His popularity mounted daily. For the French he was a man of reason,
like their Voltaire, and an advocate of the equality of man and the
virtues of rustic living, like their philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau.
They saw him as the man who had singlehandedly fomented the American
Revolution, a rumor carefully nourished by the British Ambassador in
Paris, Lord Stormont.
He was given credit for the Declaration of Independence and the
Pennsylvania Constitution. Not knowing yet of Thomas Paine, people took
it for granted that he was the author of that marvelous pamphlet “Common
Sense,” which was reprinted in French with the omission of its attacks
on royalty. They admired him alike for his scientific achievements and
for “The Way of Wealth,” the proverbs of Poor Richard as cited by Father
Abraham, which they praised to the skies as “sublime morality.”
It became the fashion of every home to have an engraving of him above
the mantel. Medallions with his image in enamel adorned the lids of
snuffboxes, and tiny ones were even set in rings, selling in incredible
numbers. In time his portrait was reproduced on watches, clocks, vases,
dishes, handkerchiefs, pocket knives. There were paintings of him
without end, and busts in marble, bronze and plaster. “These,” Franklin
wrote to his daughter Sally, “with the pictures, busts, and prints (of
which copies upon copies are spread everywhere), have made your father’s
face as well known as that of the moon.”
The first of March he moved from the Paris hotel where he and his
grandsons had been staying to Passy, a beautiful spot half a mile from
Paris, less a village than a group of villas set amidst forests and
vineyards. Their house was on the great estate of Le Ray de Chaumont, an
ardent partisan of the United States, who refused to accept rent from
his distinguished guest.
The grounds of the Chaumont estate were laid out in formal gardens
around an octagonal pond, with alleys of linden trees. Often Franklin
and his grandsons ate at the lavish Chaumont table, or had their meals
sent from the Chaumont kitchen for a minimum charge. When he gave a
large dinner party in his own quarters, everything would be sent over by
the Chaumont staff. He had his own servants, including a coachman, and
kept a carriage and a pair of horses. Benjamin Bache went to boarding
school in the village, coming home for Sunday. Temple acted as his
secretary.
The British, who had spies everywhere, were well aware of the reason for
his presence in France. Vainly did British Ambassador Lord Stormont try
to belittle him or his country. He could not match Franklin’s wit. Once
Franklin learned that Stormont was spreading a rumor that 4,000
Americans had been lost in a battle and their general killed. “Truth is
one thing. Stormont is another,” he commented dryly. In Parisian slang,
the verb “to Stormont” became a synonym for “to lie.”
In truth, with the exception of Washington’s victory over the Hessians
at Trenton, the Christmas of 1776, news from America was discouraging.
Franklin refused to show any sign of worry. “_Ça ira_,”—“it will go
on”—he would say to anyone who asked how the American Revolution was
faring. In the years of France’s own revolution, Franklin’s famous _Ça
ira_ became the catchword of a popular war song.
Some time that summer, or so it is said, Franklin passed a night at the
same inn as Edward Gibbon, author of _Rise and Fall of the Roman
Empire_. Franklin sent up a note requesting the pleasure of his company.
Gibbon answered that though he admired Franklin as a philosopher he
could not, as a loyal English subject, converse with a Rebel. Franklin
promptly sent him a second note. He had the greatest respect for the
historian, he wrote, and when Gibbon decided to write the _Rise and Fall
of the British Empire_, he would be happy to supply all the needed data.
The revolt in America had enormous glamour for innumerable European
officers who were eager to offer their services, for money, for the
thrill of adventure, and perhaps less often because they believed in the
American cause. Franklin was besieged with their requests for him to
recommend them to the American army. “My perpetual torment,” he called
them:
People will believe, notwithstanding my continually repeated
declaration to the contrary, that I am sent hither to engage officers.
You have no conception how I am harassed.... Great officers of all
ranks, in all departments; ladies, great and small, besides professed
solicitors, worry me from morning to night.... I am afraid to accept
an invitation to dine abroad, being almost sure of meeting some
officer or some officer’s friend who, as soon as I am put in good
humour with a glass of champagne, begins his attack upon me.
Only partly in jest, he composed a form letter:
The bearer of this, who is going to America, presses me to give him a
letter of recommendation, though I know nothing of him, not even his
name. This may seem extraordinary, but I assure you is not uncommon
here. Sometimes, indeed, one unknown person brings another, equally
unknown, to recommend him; and sometimes they recommend one another.
As to this gentleman, I must refer you to himself for his character
and merits, with which he is certainly better acquainted than I can
possibly be. I recommend him, however, to those civilities which every
stranger of whom one knows no harm has a right to; and I request you
will do him all the good offices, and show him all the favour, that on
further acquaintance you shall find him to deserve.
Temple later claimed that he actually used this letter on occasion,
though it has never been proved.
There was, however, one officer whom Franklin recommended to George
Washington without ever having met. This was the nineteen-year-old
Marquis de Lafayette, an ardent youth set on revenging a father killed
by the English. “He is exceedingly beloved,” he wrote Washington early
in August after Lafayette had already left France, “and everybody’s good
wishes attend him; we cannot but hope he may meet with such a reception
as will make the country and his expedition agreeable to him.”
Another valuable recruit Franklin sent to America was the former
Prussian officer Baron von Steuben, whose rigid training of American
troops at Valley Forge raised morale at a moment when it had sunk to a
new low.
In England, he still had friends in high places. Lord Rockingham was
praising his courage in crossing the Atlantic, risking capture and being
brought to an “implacable tribunal.” Charles James Fox, a member of Lord
North’s cabinet, was quoting to his fellow cabinet members Franklin’s
remark that England’s war on America would be as costly and useless as
the Crusades. While to George III he had become “that insidious man from
Philadelphia,” Sir John Pringle, now president of the Royal Society,
supported him in one of the few comic episodes of wartime.
During Franklin’s stay in England, he had given advice on installing
lightning rods on St. Paul’s Cathedral and other important buildings.
One member of the Royal Society, Benjamin Wilson, an artist who had
painted Franklin’s portrait, argued that blunt lightning rods would be
more effective than pointed ones, but he had been over-ruled. The battle
between “the sharps and the flats” raged briefly and then subsided.
It was revived when the war was under way by George III, who felt that
since pointed lightning rods had been invented by a Rebel, they must
certainly be subversive. He ordered that the rods on his palace and
throughout the United Kingdom be replaced by the blunt type and
commanded Sir John Pringle to back him. Sir John boldly retorted that
the laws of nature were not changeable at royal pleasure. He was
thereupon informed that the royal authority did not believe that a man
of his views should occupy the presidency of the Royal Society. Sir
John, loyal to Franklin to the end, promptly resigned.
As for Franklin, he remained an objective observer: “I have never
entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions,”
he wrote in October 1777. “I leave them to take their chances in the
world. If they are _right_, truth and experience will support them; if
_wrong_, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour
one’s temper, and disturb one’s quiet.”
In November a visitor to Passy informed him that General Howe had taken
Philadelphia. (Congress had fled to York, Pennsylvania, which became
temporarily the capital of the United States.) Calm and smiling,
Franklin countered, “I beg your pardon, sir. Philadelphia has taken
Howe.”
Inwardly, he was gravely concerned. His daughter and her family, his
home, those he loved, and everything he owned was in Philadelphia. But
he could not afford to let his anxiety show.
He considered at this time telling Vergennes that unless America could
count on a French alliance, they would have to make terms with England,
but decided the threat might boomerang and force the French to abandon
them. Best wait until the news was better. It so happened he had not
long to wait.
On December 4, a messenger from Boston arrived at Passy, to announce
that General John Burgoyne, whom the British had sent to Canada to lead
an army to invade the colonies from the north, had been defeated at
Saratoga. Beaumarchais, who was present when this news came, drove off
to Paris so recklessly that his carriage upset and his arm was broken.
Franklin and his two commissioners promptly drew up a dispatch for
Vergennes. Two days later Conrad-Alexandre Gérard of the foreign office
arrived at Passy with Vergennes’ congratulations—and a request that the
Americans renew their proposal for an alliance.
Franklin drafted the proposal on December 7 and Temple delivered it the
next day. On the 12th, the commissioners met secretly with Vergennes.
Franklin hoped the matter could be settled there and then but the French
minister said France could not agree to an alliance without Spain. It
took three weeks for a courier to make the trip and bring back an answer
from Spain. It was negative. Temporarily negotiations were at a
standstill.
In the meantime England had sent an envoy named Paul Wentworth to parley
with the Americans. He passed himself off as a stock speculator though
he was actually chief of the British espionage. Silas Deane saw him
several times. Wentworth told him that the British ministry was ready to
return to the imperial status of before 1763, suggested a general
armistice with all British troops withdrawn except those on the New York
islands, and added, insinuatingly, that any Americans who helped to
bring about an understanding would be rewarded with wealth and titles
and high administrative posts.
Franklin knew about Wentworth but refused to see him until January 6, a
week after the news of Spain’s rejection of the alliance. That day he
conferred two hours with Wentworth, devoting the whole time to a recital
of England’s crimes against America. After that he and Wentworth had
dinner with Silas Deane and his assistant Edward Bancroft (who was also
an English spy).
The results of this dinner were exactly what Franklin anticipated. It
was duly reported to Vergennes, who could only judge that negotiations
for a reconciliation between England and America were under way, which
was the last thing in the world he wanted. The very next day the French
King’s council voted formally on a treaty and an alliance with the
United States of America.
The signing of the treaty took place on Friday, February 7, 1778, at the
office of the ministry for foreign affairs in the Hotel de Lautrec,
Paris. For this all important occasion Franklin donned an old costume,
somewhat old-fashioned and rather too tight for him, of figured
Manchester velvet. Someone asked him why. “To get it a little revenge,”
Franklin said. “I wore this coat on the day Wedderburn abused me.”
The ceremony was simple. Gérard signed first, then Franklin, after which
Arthur Lee and Silas Deane added their names. A magnificent diplomatic
campaign had been won.
On March 20, Louis XVI avowed the treaty by receiving the three
commissioners in his private quarters at Versailles. Franklin wore a
brown velvet suit, white hose, and carried a white hat under his arm. He
had neither wig nor sword, and his spectacles were on his nose. The
courtiers claimed they had never seen anything so striking as this
“republican simplicity.”
To the commissioners, the King said, “Firmly assure Congress of my
friendship. I hope that this will be for the good of the two nations.”
Franklin responded for his fellow envoys. “Your Majesty may count on the
gratitude of Congress and its faithful observance of the pledges it now
takes.”
That evening Vergennes gave a great dinner in their honor at Versailles.
Later they made a call on the royal family. The charming and beautiful
Marie Antoinette, who was at her gambling table, insisted that Franklin
stand by her, and talked to him in between making her bids at
exceedingly high stakes. It was certainly the first time in history that
the son of an American candlemaker kept company with a queen.
15
AMERICA’S FIRST AMBASSADOR
In the spring after the signing of the treaty with France, Silas Deane
was recalled to America. John Adams was sent to take his place. Franklin
invited him and his wife Abigail to stay with him at Passy, and arranged
for their ten-year-old son John Quincy to go to school with Benjamin
Bache.
The comfortable life at Passy made Puritan-minded Adams uncomfortable.
Though Franklin’s taste in dress and food was exceedingly simple
compared to the French aristocrats with whom he had to keep company,
Adams found him extravagant. He felt it a waste of money that Arthur Lee
should have separate quarters in Paris. At the same time he objected
that no rent was paid at Passy and vainly tried to get Chaumont to
accept payment.
He could not help himself. Basically it was simply impossible for him to
approve of someone like Benjamin Franklin: “He loves his ease, hates to
offend, and seldom gives any opinion till obliged to do it.... Although
he has as determined a soul as any man, yet it is his constant policy
never to say yes or no decidedly but when he cannot avoid it.”
John Adams was a man who always said yes or no decidedly, never having,
like Franklin, learned from Socrates that if you wish to convince
people, making them think for themselves is more effective than
bludgeoning them.
But as he was essentially honest, Adams did not deny that Franklin was
beloved by the French as he would never be: “His name was familiar to
government and people,” he wrote later, “to king, courtiers, nobility,
clergy, and philosophers, as well as plebeians, to such a degree that
there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a _valet de chambre_,
coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in a kitchen who
was not familiar with it and who did not consider him a friend to human
kind.... When they spoke of him they seemed to think he was to restore
the golden age....”
In one of the many elaborate ceremonies organized in Franklin’s honor, a
crown of laurel was placed on his white hair by the most beautiful of
three hundred women admirers. At another, a walking stick with a gold
head wrought in the form of a cap of liberty was presented to him. A
poem, composed for the occasion, was read.
The wood of the cane, it said, had been seized on the plains of Marathon
by the Goddess of Liberty before she abandoned Greece. It had been
transported to Switzerland, where the valiant mountaineers fought
against invading Austrians. More recently it had been seen at Trenton,
where Washington defeated the British. By possession of this symbol of
victory, Benjamin Franklin was assured of a place in the “Temple of
Memory.”
Franklin’s French friends had long been hoping for a meeting between him
and Voltaire, considered the two most enlightened men of the eighteenth
century. In February 1778, after an exile of more than twenty-eight
years, Voltaire returned to spend the last four months of his life in
Paris. With his grandson Temple, Franklin called to pay his respects to
the great philosopher. Voltaire was then eighty-four, lean and
emaciated, but he still had the fiery spirit that had kept all Europe in
an uproar over the major part of his life. He insisted on greeting the
“illustrious and wise Franklin” in English, and held his hand over
Temple’s head in blessing, pronouncing the words “God and Liberty.”
There was a more publicized meeting in April at the Academy of Sciences.
The audience, seeing both present, clamored to have them introduced to
each other. Obligingly, they stepped forward and bowed to each other.
The spectators were not yet satisfied. They wanted them to embrace each
other in the French manner. Only when Franklin and Voltaire put their
arms around each other and kissed each other’s cheeks did the tumult
subside.
That year the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, who had immortalized
Voltaire in marble, did his bust of Franklin, catching his likeness
better than any other had done. And that Baron Turgot, the French
Minister of Finance, made his most famous epigram about Franklin: “He
snatched the lightning from the sky and the sceptre from the tyrants.”
Vainly Franklin protested that other Americans, “able and brave men,”
deserved credit for the Revolution.
On September 14, 1778, Congress revoked the commission of three and
elected Franklin sole plenipotentiary to France—America’s first official
ambassador to a foreign land. With only Temple and a clerk to help him
with detail work, he was in actual fact consul-general, consultant on
American affairs, propagandist for America, and, the part which pleased
Franklin least but which he performed expertly, official beggar to the
Court of Versailles for the ever increasing sums of money which Congress
instructed him to procure for their costly war.
With his other duties, he was director of naval affairs, Judge of the
Admiralty, and in effect if not in name, overseas Secretary of the Navy.
In this capacity in March of 1779 he wrote a “passport” for the Pacific
explorer Captain James Cook, instructing commanders of American ships
that Cook and his crew should be treated as “common friends to mankind”
and allowed to go on their way. The sad news had not reached Europe; a
month before Franklin’s instructions, Cook had been killed by natives on
the Hawaiian Islands.
Ever since his arrival in France, he had been concerned with the plight
of captured American seamen, whom the English kept in foul prisons and
treated not as prisoners-of-war but as traitors, charged with high
treason and subject to execution. To Lord Stormont, the British
ambassador, he had sent a formal plea requesting the exchange of
American prisoners for English ones, man for man. It was ignored. A
second came back unopened with a note: “The King’s Ambassador receives
no Letters from Rebels but when they come to implore his Majesty’s
Mercy.”
Through an English friend, David Hartley, Franklin sent money for the
relief of the American prisoners, and generous Englishmen added to the
fund. That was all that could be done until some nine months after the
signing of the treaty with France, when he received reluctant consent
from the London ministry for prisoner exchange.
There was still the problem of getting sufficient English prisoners for
the exchange. Before the treaty, British seamen on the “prizes” which
American ships brought into French ports had to be set free by maritime
law. With France now officially at war with England, the ban no longer
applied, but there were still far fewer English prisoners in France than
American ones in England.
In May 1779, as Minister of the United States at the Court of France,
Franklin signed a commission for Captain Stephen Marchant of Boston, on
the privateer, the _Black Prince_, to operate off the north coast of
France. The _Black Prince_ was so named for her sleek lines, her black
sides, and her reputation as one of the swiftest vessels ever to run a
cargo.
Franklin’s instructions to the captain were brief and explicit. He was
to bring in all the prisoners possible “to relieve so many of our
countrymen from their captivity in England.” He only found out later
that Captain Marchant was a figurehead. The real commander of the _Black
Prince_ was a twenty-five-year-old Irishman named Luke Ryan, with a
dazzling record as a smuggler—an honorable profession in an Ireland
reduced to starvation by repressive English trade regulations.
The success of the _Black Prince_ was phenomenal—twenty-nine prizes,
including a recapture, in the space of two months and eleven days.
Franklin gave commissions to two sister privateers, the _Black Princess_
and the _Fearnot_. Their combined efforts produced a total of 114
British vessels of all descriptions, brought into free ports, burned,
scuttled or ransomed. They created havoc with coastal trade in the
English, Irish and Scotch seas, embarrassed the British Admiralty,
caused marine insurance rates to soar.
Franklin was proud of his three privateers and must have had a vicarious
thrill in their exploits. His own role in the affair became increasingly
worrisome. Each prize was judged in the local marine court of the port
where it was brought. Sometimes there were delays, resulting in the loss
of perishable cargo and voluble cries of protest from the crews who saw
their prize money diminishing daily. In due time Franklin, as Judge of
the Admiralty, received the bulky and voluminous report, handwritten and
of course in French. It was up to him and Temple to appraise the
contents if the venture was to be kept going.
Unfortunately, much as the privateers disrupted English shipping, the
number of prisoners was far fewer than Franklin had hoped. Sometimes
there was no room for prisoners on shipboard, or, when there were
captive ships to man, not enough men to guard prisoners. Franklin
proposed that the privateer captains get sea paroles from those they set
free, but the British stubbornly refused to honor the paroles in
prisoner exchange. There were also numerous British seamen who gladly
joined the privateer crews, finding their free life far preferable to
the cruel discipline of the British Navy.
Aside from his privateers, Franklin pinned his hope on a Scottish-born
American seaman with a colorful past, named John Paul Jones. In 1778,
Jones had captured the _Drake_, the first British warship to surrender
to a Continental vessel. He had come to Brest from America in the
_Ranger_, which had raided English and Scottish coasts, taking seven
prizes. Red tape kept Jones idle for some months after that but at
length he was given an aged and decrepit French forty-gun ship, which he
renamed the _Bonhomme Richard_—the French translation of “Poor Richard.”
In September 1779, the _Bonhomme Richard_ closed in on the superior
British frigate, the _Serapis_, in a battle which lasted three and a
half hours. When the hull of the _Bonhomme Richard_ was pierced, her
decks ripped, her hold filling with water, and fires destroying her, the
British captain asked if they were ready to surrender.
“Sir, I have not yet begun to fight,” Jones reportedly replied.
While his ship was sinking, he and his men boarded the _Serapis_ and
took her captive.
Exultantly, Franklin prepared his dispatch to Congress, announcing “one
of the most obstinate and bloody conflicts that has happened in this
war.” With even greater pleasure he reported three weeks later that John
Paul Jones was safe in Texel, North Holland, with some 500 British
prisoners! In Paris soon afterward the welcome given the hero of the
_Bonhomme Richard_ rivaled only Franklin’s reception there.
At home the war was going drearily. Combined American forces failed to
win Savannah from the British. A British expedition took Charleston. The
British General Cornwallis, marching inland, routed General Horatio
Gates. England, now at war with Holland, captured tiny St. Eustatius,
thus cutting off America’s chief West Indian source of supplies.
Benedict Arnold had turned traitor, and the British had moved their army
from Philadelphia to New York.
The Bache family, who had been living in the country, returned to find
that the officers who had occupied their house had carried off some of
Franklin’s musical instruments, Temple’s school books, and some
electrical apparatus. The portrait of Franklin done by Benjamin Wilson
had also vanished. It turned out that it had been taken by the English
spy Major John André. (It reached England but was later restored to the
White House in Washington in 1906.)
In the spring of 1781, Franklin received two American visitors at Passy,
young Colonel John Laurens, son of the former Congress president Henry
Laurens, and Thomas Paine. There was another financial crisis in
Congress and they had come to request a loan of a million pounds
sterling each year for the duration. Franklin had foreseen the need and
could tell them he already had a promise of an outright gift of 6
million livres. Since July 1780, General Rochambeau and 6,000 fully
equipped French regulars were in America, waiting for the auspicious
time to join the conflict. France had its own to protect now.
The tide turned that year. The valiant General Nathanael Greene (nephew
by marriage of Franklin’s friend, Catherine Ray Greene) together with
Daniel Morgan, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, and Francis Marion (known as
“The Swamp Fox”) harassed Cornwallis into Virginia, where General
Lafayette, in charge of his first command, forced him onto the peninsula
of Yorktown. To Lafayette’s aid came two armies, the American one led by
Washington, and the French one led by Rochambeau. The siege lasted just
nine days. Cornwallis surrendered on October 18, 1781. The news reached
Franklin at eleven o’clock on the night of November 19, just one month
later.
The defeat of Cornwallis at Yorktown marked the unofficial end of the
war, though George III refused to believe it. In his disordered mental
state, he could not face the reality of the enormous budget asked from
an empty treasury. Nearly everyone else knew that the former American
colonies were lost to the British Empire forever.
Franklin wrote Congress offering his resignation, planning that if it
were accepted he would take his grandsons on a tour in Italy and
Germany. Congress had other plans for him. Along with John Adams and
John Jay of New York, he was chosen a commissioner to negotiate the
formal peace with Great Britain.
“I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous,” Franklin
wrote John Adams, “that was not censured as inadequate.... I esteem it,
however, an honour.”
John Jay and his family came to stay at Passy, as the Adams family had
done. Maria Jay, age one and a half years, formed a “singular
attachment” to the ancient philosopher, which he claimed he would never
forget.
The peace negotiations dragged on month after month, seemingly
interminable. In April 1782, in the midst of them, Franklin was stricken
with a kidney stone, which disabled him the rest of his life. From then
on even the jolting of his carriage over the cobblestone streets was
unbearably painful. He refused either to have an operation or take
drugs. “You may judge that my disease is not very grievous,” he wrote
John Jay, “since I am more afraid of the medicine than the malady.”
The preliminary Anglo-American peace terms were finally signed on
November 30, 1782, and on September 3, 1783, came the signing of the
Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain at last acknowledged the
independence of the United States. The achievement of this treaty, by
Franklin with John Adams and John Jay, would be labeled “the greatest
triumph in the history of American diplomacy.”
“May we never see another war!” wrote Franklin to Josiah Quincy. “For in
my opinion there never was a good war or a bad peace.”
“The times that tried men’s souls are over,” wrote Thomas Paine in
America.
Franklin was seventy-seven, sick with gout, dropsy, and half a dozen
minor ailments besides his dreadful stone, but his mind was as keen and
his soul as full of fun as a youth of twenty. No one ever had a more
glorious old age than he was having.
16
A GLORIOUS OLD AGE
On August 27, 1783, just a few days before the signing of the peace
treaty with England, a balloon ascension was held at the Champ-de-Mars.
It was the first in Paris; the first in history had taken place near
Lyons in the previous June. For four days preceding the event, the great
balloon of varnished silk had been filling up with hydrogen gas under
the direction of the physicist Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles. Paris
was agog with excitement. Some 50,000 gathered to watch.
Franklin, who was present, reported that the balloon rose rapidly “till
it entered the clouds, when it seemed to me scarce bigger than an orange
and soon after became invisible.”
“What good is it?” a skeptic asked.
“What good is a newborn baby?” Franklin retorted, a remark that went
around the world.
He saw the first free balloon ascend with human passengers on November
20, at the Château de la Muette in Passy. The passengers, scientist
Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arland, were lifted some 500 feet,
floated over the Seine, and landed in Paris. A few weeks later he
witnessed a balloon soar upwards from the Paris Tuileries, taking its
human cargo to the incredible height of 2,000 feet.
He could not resist speculating as to what man’s triumph over space
might mean to the future. Would the balloon perhaps become a common
means of transportation? How delightful that would be for one like
himself for whom riding in a carriage had become such agony. But he
could hardly hope for such comfort in his lifetime.
More to the point was the possibility that the actuality of balloon
flight might convince “sovereigns of the folly of wars”:
Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not
cost more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can
afford so to cover his country with troops for its defense as that ten
thousand men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an
infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to
repel them?
Not even the wealthiest and most powerful ruler could guard his
dominions against such an air raid. The terrible threat would mean an
end to warfare. So Franklin reasoned, happily unable to peer into the
future.
Following the Treaty of Paris, Congress had retained his services as
ambassador to France for two years longer. He served unofficially as
United States ambassador for all of Europe, and new honors rained down
on him. He was elected a member of Madrid’s Royal Academy of History, of
Manchester’s Literary and Philosophical Society, of the Academies of
Sciences and Arts in the French towns of Orléans and Lyons. Through
Admiral Lord Richard Howe, a staunch friend still, the British Admiralty
sent him Captain Cook’s _Voyage to the Pacific Ocean_, a tribute to his
instructions to American cruisers to refrain from interfering with the
explorer and his crew.
His real and solid pleasures came not from such tokens of recognition
but from the circle of good friends he had acquired in his years at
Passy. He was on good terms with the parish priest, the village
tradesmen, and all the children of the town. The Chaumont family, on
whose estate he lived, were deeply devoted to him, including the young
daughter Sophie whom he called “my little wife.”
He established strong bonds of friendship with his neighbor, the lovely
and talented young Madame Brillon, wife of an elderly treasury official.
For several years he called on her nearly every Wednesday and Saturday,
to play chess or to idle on her terrace in the sun. Sometimes he played
for her on his armonica.
Once he spent a summer day with Madame Brillon and some other companions
on Moulin-Joli, an island on the Seine. Over the river hovered a swarm
of tiny May flies, known as _ephemera_ since their life span is but a
few hours. As a souvenir of this holiday, he wrote the “Ephemera,” one
of his most charming fables, a delicate satire about the trivia which
make up the thoughts and actions of many human souls during their own
comparatively brief period on earth.
“Papa,” Madame Brillon called Franklin. After she and her husband left
Passy, she sent him a plaintive note. “How am I going to spend the
Wednesdays and Saturdays?” Might they perhaps be united in paradise? “We
shall live on roast apples only; the music will be made up of Scottish
airs ... everyone will speak the same language; the English will be
neither unjust nor wicked ... ambition, envy, pretensions, jealousy,
prejudices, all these will vanish at the sound of the trumpet.”
Young and old, French women lavished attention on the American
philosopher. In return, he gave them affection both fatherly and
gallant, told them amusing stories, and showed that combination of
respect for their mental capacities and appreciation of their womanly
charms which had won over Catherine Ray Greene so many years before.
Among his many close women friends the most celebrated was the elderly
Madame Helvétius, widow of a wealthy landowner and philosopher, who
lived with her two daughters at Auteuil, a village next to Passy, in the
midst of a little park planted with hortensias and rhododendron, and
over-run with cats, dogs, chickens, canaries, pigeons, and wild birds.
“Our Lady of Auteuil,” Franklin called her, while her daughters were
“_les étoiles_,” the stars.
Her salon was frequented by philosophers, statesmen, poets, scientists,
and mathematicians. Franklin first met her through the French minister
Turgot. When she knew him better she told him she wished she had
welcomed him as she had Voltaire, whom she had greeted at her gate like
a king.
One of the many scholars Franklin met at her salon was a talented young
doctor named Philippe Pinel. Franklin advised him to come to America
where doctors were badly needed. Pinel was tempted but refused—and
became famous for his courage and wisdom in removing chains from the
insane at the Paris hospitals of Bicêtre and Saltpêtrière.
While John Adams and his wife Abigail were at Passy, Franklin invited
Madame Helvétius to dinner. The worthy Abigail was horrified when Madame
Helvétius kissed Franklin’s cheeks and forehead in greeting. Even more
shocking in her eyes, the guest held Franklin’s hand at dinner and now
and then let her arm rest on the back of John Adams’ chair.
“I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct,” Abigail wrote
afterwards, “if the good Doctor had not told me that in this lady I
should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free from affectation or
stiffness of behaviour, and one of the best women in the world. For this
I must take the Doctor’s word; but I should have set her down for a very
bad one.”
Whatever Abigail Adams thought, there is no doubt of Franklin’s
devotion. Sometime—no one knows just when—he proposed marriage to Madame
Helvétius. She refused him. Perhaps she was too accustomed to her own
way of life to want to make a change. Perhaps she felt that his proposal
was only a form of gallantry. Neither the proposal nor her refusal
interfered with their friendship, which lasted as long as he stayed in
France and by correspondence afterward.
Since 1777 he had his own private press at Passy and a foundry to cast
his own type. His excuse was that the press was useful with so many
official forms to be prepared, but it was also true that printing was
still in his blood and always would be.
One of the pamphlets that came off the Passy printing press was
“Information to Those who would Remove to America.” He thought too many
of the wrong people wanted to emigrate to America for the wrong reasons,
and he wanted to correct their misapprehensions. He discouraged artists
and scholars who expected they would receive free transportation, land,
slaves, tools and livestock from a rich but ignorant America. In
America, a man who did not bring his fortune “must work and be
industrious to live.”
The chief resource of America was cheap land, he pointed out. Farm
laborers were needed. Skilled artisans could make a good living and
“provide for children and old age.” But “those Europeans who have these
or greater advantages at home would do well to stay where they are.”
To answer those who besieged him with questions about the Indians, he
wrote “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” perhaps the
first fair appraisal of America’s original inhabitants to be printed:
The Indian men, when young, are hunters and warriors; when old,
counsellors; for all their government is by counsel of the sages;
there is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel
obedience or inflict punishment.... The Indian women till the ground,
dress the food, nurse and bring up the children, and preserve and hand
down to posterity the memory of public transactions. These employments
of men and women are accounted natural and honourable. Having few
artificial wants they have abundance of leisure for improvement by
conversation. Our laborious manner of life, compared with theirs, they
esteem slavish and base; and the learning on which we value ourselves
they regard as frivolous and useless....
So he continued, by illustration and by example, to show that while
Indian ways and customs were quite different from those of the white
men, there was much to be said for them, and they were by no means
always inferior. In fact, there was much which men who called themselves
civilized could learn by studying the nature of those called savages.
Some pieces in lighter vein were also run off his press, which Franklin
wrote partly as an exercise in French, partly to entertain himself and
his friends. In one of these bagatelles, as such pieces are known, he
told Parisians of a discovery he had made whereby they could make great
savings in the cost of candles and oil lamps. He had gone to bed one
night, as usual at three or four hours after midnight, and had been
awakened by a sudden noise at six, to find that his room was flooded
with light! His servant had forgotten to close the shutters before he
retired. Looking into his almanac, he learned what few others could
know—that the sun rises early and “_that he gives light as soon as he
rises_.”
Another of his bagatelles was “Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout,”
in which Gout explains his frequent and unwelcome visits as due simply
to Franklin’s indolence; he plays chess too much and exercises too
little. The “Ephemera” was printed as a bagatelle, and so was “The
Whistle,” an expanded version of the little story he had once told his
son William.
His intellectual curiosity had not slackened during his years in France.
War or no war, he continued to observe natural phenomenon, write and
reflect on scientific matters, and keep up with the newest discoveries
and inventions.
He attended meetings of the Royal Society of Medicine, to which he had
been elected in 1777, and of the French Academy of Science. In 1782, he
watched Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier perform an experiment with the gas he
had named oxygen—Joseph Priestley’s “dephlogistated air.” He wrote to
Jan Ingenhousz, a Dutch scientist, about differences between the Leyden
jar and Volta’s new electrophorus, and to Edward Nairne, an English
friend, about the comparative humidity of the air in London,
Philadelphia and Passy.
To a French friend, Count de Gebelin, he discoursed on the
characteristics of the various Indian languages. When de Gebelin
commented that some Indian words sounded Phoenician, Franklin dived into
archaeological speculations:
If any Phoenicians arrived in America, I should rather think it was
not by the accident of a storm but in the course of their long and
adventurous voyages; and that they coasted from Denmark and Norway
over to Greenland, and down southward by Newfoundland, Nova Scotia,
etc., to New England; as the Danes themselves certainly did some ages
before Columbus.
He wrote a paper on the phenomenon of the aurora borealis (the northern
lights) for the French Academy of Science, sent notes to Marie
Antoinette’s physician, Felix Vicq d’Azyr, on the length of time
infection could remain in the body after death, and investigated a story
of some workmen in the Passy quarry who claimed to have found living
toads shut up in solid stone.
In a letter to another friend, the Abbé Soulavie, he pondered on why
there were coal mines under the sea at Whitehaven and oyster shells in
the Derbyshire mountains—indications of great geological changes in the
past. Was it possible that the surface of the earth was a shell “capable
of being broken and disordered by the violent movements of the fluid on
which it rested?” Admittedly, this was only a guess: “I approve much
more your method of philosophizing, which proceeds upon actual
observations....”
He still tinkered with inventions, and for his own comfort devised the
first bifocal glasses, so he could see both near and far without
changing his spectacles.
He was old enough to be serious all the time, but he never could resist
a hoax, even with his scientific friends. To the eminent French
physician Georges Cabanis he confided that in the forests of North
America he had observed a bird which “like the horned screamer or the
horned lapwing, carries two horned tubercles at the joints of the wings.
These two tubercles at the death of the bird become the sprouts of two
vegetable stalks, which grow at first in sucking the juice from its
cadaver and which subsequently attach themselves to the earth in order
to live in the manner of plants and trees.”
The inspiration for this weird creation of his imagination was perhaps
the “vegetable animal” he thought he saw on the gulf weed he had fished
out of the Gulf Stream at the age of twenty. His friend Cabanis,
suspecting nothing, dutifully reported it in one of his books, taking
only the precaution to note that “in spite of the great veracity of
Franklin, I cite it with a great deal of reserve.”
What endless marvels the world offered and how much there was to know
about them! One lifetime was not nearly long enough. “The rapid progress
true science now makes occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born
so soon,” he wrote Joseph Priestley after their countries were at peace
once more. “It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be
carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter.... O that
moral science were in as fair a way of improvement that men would cease
to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn
what they now improperly call humanity.” He could not guess that his
fervent cry would still be echoed, in one form or another, more than a
hundred and seventy-five years after his death.
In 1784, the King of France chose him to serve on a commission of five
to investigate the work of Dr. Franz Anton Mesmer, who claimed to effect
cures through “animal magnetism,”—a universal fluid which flowed to his
patients from the healer, or from some object “magnetized” by the
healer, such as a tree. All fashionable Paris was flocking to Mesmer’s
seances; his following was enormous throughout France.
With Franklin on this commission served Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (whose
name would survive in the French Revolution’s chief instrument of
execution) and the scientist Lavoisier (whom the guillotine would claim
as a victim). After many months of study, the commission concluded that
“animal magnetism” did not exist, and that Mesmer’s cures were the
result of “imagination.” The importance of imagination in physical
illness was as yet unrecognized. Privately Franklin commented that
Mesmer’s treatments certainly did some good—at least they kept some from
taking injurious drugs.
On the whole the findings of the commission brought both Mesmer and
mesmerism into disrepute. Indirectly the shadow of its disapproval fell
on a phenomenon first discovered by a Mesmer disciple, the Marquis de
Puysegur—that some persons, in a state of trance and apparently asleep,
are able to obey simple commands. Hypnotism, for many years after de
Puysegur’s observations, was relegated to quacks rather than physicians
and scientists.
In August of 1784 Thomas Jefferson arrived from America to help
negotiate treaties with European and North African powers. Franklin
introduced him to his French scientific friends and found in his company
the same harmony as when they were both members of the Second
Continental Congress. His last winter in France, Polly Hewson and her
children also joined him at Passy. Mrs. Stevenson, Polly’s mother, had
died in England during the war. Franklin welcomed these members of his
“English family” with joy and affection.
He still had his two grandsons with him. There had been some objections
from Congress to his making Temple his secretary, on the grounds that he
was the son of a traitor. Franklin had been highly indignant: “Methinks
it is rather some merit that I have rescued a valuable young man from
the danger of being a Tory, and fixed him in honest republican Whig
principles.”
Yet there was some justification in the fears of Congress. At
twenty-six, Temple was charming, handsome and spoiled. He spent his
evenings at music halls and, wearing red heels, an embroidered coat, and
with an Angora cat on a leash, paraded the boulevards with aristocratic
young friends. Mockingly the Parisians dubbed him “Franklinet.” While
Franklin was trying to kill a clause in the peace treaty conceding
special privileges to Tories, Temple, without his knowledge, wrote to
Lord Shelburne pleading a government post for his Tory father.
Different as could be was Benjamin Bache, now sixteen, a husky wholesome
youngster much like Franklin at his age. He wanted no more than to be a
printer as his grandfather had been. Franklin taught him how to cast
type, and in April 1785 persuaded the best printer in France to make him
an apprentice. The arrangement was of short duration.
In May, Franklin at last received permission from Congress to come home.
Jefferson was appointed ambassador to France in his stead. “I am not
replacing Franklin,” Jefferson said loyally. “No one could do that. I am
only his successor.”
He left Passy on July 12, 1785, traveling to Havre in a royal litter
drawn by mules, which the King had provided for his comfort. His
personal goods—128 boxes in all—went by barge down the Seine. He took
with him Louis XVI’s personal gift—the King’s miniature, set with 408
diamonds. The whole population of Passy watched him leave, silent except
for occasional outbursts of sobs.
“All the days of my life I shall remember that a great man, a sage,
wished to be my friend,” wrote Madame Brillon just before his departure.
A farewell note from Madame Helvétius was waiting for him at Havre: “I
see you in your litter, every step taking you further from us, lost to
me and all my friends who love you so much and to whom you leave such
long regrets.”
He and his grandsons spent four days at Southampton, England. William
Franklin came down from London, where he was now living, to see them,
but the meeting with his father was brief and strained. Then Benjamin
Franklin set off for his eighth crossing of the Atlantic. He knew it
would be his last.
17
THE CLOSING YEARS
Never had America given a returning hero a more resounding welcome.
Booming cannons announced his landing on September 14, 1785, at
Philadelphia’s Market Street wharf. Bells rang throughout the city and
the whole town was out to greet him. Cheering crowds lined the street as
his carriage proceeded to his home at Franklin Court, where Sally and
his grandchildren, eight now in all, were waiting for him. Ceremonies in
his honor continued for weeks.
Old and feeble and almost constantly in pain, he was still not allowed
to relax. On October 11, he was made president of the Supreme Executive
Council of the Pennsylvania Assembly—an Assembly which would never again
have to pay heed to “the proprietors.” On October 29, two weeks later,
he was elected president of Pennsylvania. To avoid the agony of riding
in a carriage, he had a sedan chair built, so he could be carried to
meetings.
His eightieth birthday, January 6, 1786, was celebrated at the Bunch of
Grapes Tavern by Philadelphia’s now numerous printers. They drank their
first toast to their “venerable printer, philosopher, and statesman.” At
least once in this period George Washington came to dinner with him. One
pleasant afternoon and evening he spent with Thomas Paine, now one of
America’s most distinguished citizens; together they worked on inventing
a “smokeless candle.” For a while, Franklin kept in his garden a model
of an iron bridge which Paine had invented and which attracted droves of
curious visitors.
He tried vainly to secure a post for Temple, but Congress was still
doubtful about him. Later he bought the young man a farm at Rancocas,
New Jersey. Temple liked farm life so little he spent most of his time
in Philadelphia. For Benjamin Bache he set up a printing press and type
foundry, which the youth managed contentedly until at the age of thirty
an attack of yellow fever brought his life to a premature end.
In July 1786, an Indian chief of the Wyandots, named Scotosh, came to
Franklin with a message from his people, bringing strings of white
wampum. Franklin received him with the same courtesy due any ambassador.
Following the Indian custom, he waited two days to consider the chief’s
message, then presented more strings of wampum with his reply.
In the Pennsylvania Assembly, that September, he helped revise the penal
code. No longer were men to be hanged for robbery, arson, or
counterfeiting. By the new act only murder and treason warranted capital
punishment. Branding with a hot iron, flogging, the pillory were all
abolished. Such barbarities did not belong in a new nation.
He was pleased with signs of progress and quick recovery from war. “Our
working-people are all employed and get high wages, are well fed and
well clad,” he wrote in November. “Buildings in Philadelphia increase
rapidly, besides small towns rising in every quarter of the country. The
laws govern, justice is well administered, and property is as secure as
in any country in the globe.... In short, all among us may be happy who
have happy dispositions; such being necessary to happiness even in
paradise.”
But all was not yet honey and roses in the new United States, as he soon
discovered. Much trouble had risen because of the lack of power of the
Confederacy.
Under the Articles of the Confederation, Congress might declare war, but
could not enlist a single soldier. Congress could ask the states for
money, but had no authority to raise a dollar by taxation. It could make
treaties but could not force the states to recognize them. It could not
regulate commerce and each state taxed imports as it wished. Not only
the Confederacy, but all the states issued their own money, resulting in
endless confusion.
To create a strong central government, the Constitutional Convention
opened on May 25, 1787, at the Philadelphia State House, in the same
room where the Declaration of Independence had been signed. Franklin,
who was the oldest delegate here, as he had been at the Second
Continental Congress, expressed the hope that good would come from the
Convention: “Indeed if it does not do good it must do harm, as it will
show that we have not wisdom enough among us to govern ourselves.”
There were fifty-five delegates in all, the best minds in America.
George Washington was the natural choice as presiding officer. All that
hot summer they labored on the task of making a workable constitution.
Franklin did not miss a meeting in the four months. As always, he said
little. When he had a speech to make, he wrote it out in advance and let
James Wilson, or some other delegate, read it for him. He could no
longer stand to deliver an address without pain. In the course of the
sessions he advocated three ideas—a single legislature, a plural
executive, the nonpayment of officers. All three were rejected. He
accepted the defeat without rancor.
His main role was as a peacemaker. In case of an impasse, as was
inevitable with so many contrary views and opinions, it was invariably
he who suggested a workable compromise. Once, when feelings were taut to
the point of hostility, he moved that the Convention open its sessions
with prayer:
“I have lived a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing
proofs I see of this truth: that God governs in the affairs of men. And
if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it
probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”
His motion was received with respect but no action was taken on it.
Perhaps he guessed there would be none. Whether he planned it or not,
his proposal had the effect of cooling hot tempers, and work continued
with less dissension.
The final day of the Convention was Monday, September 17. The great
document, which was the fruit of their heavy labor, was read by the
secretary. Then James Wilson gave Franklin’s comments:
I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do
not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them;
for, having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being
obliged by better information or fuller consideration to change my
opinions.... In these sentiments, sir, I agree to this Constitution
with all its faults, if there are such; because I think a general
government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but
what may be a blessing to the people if well administered.... Thus I
consent, sir, to this Constitution because I expect no better, and
because I am not sure that it is not the best....
Then Franklin moved that the Constitution be signed by the delegates as
“done in Convention by the unanimous consent of the states present.”
While the last delegates were affixing their signature, Franklin’s eyes
were on the president’s chair, on the back of which a sunset—or
sunrise—was painted. To those near him he said, “I have often and often
in the course of the session ... looked at that sun behind the president
without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at
length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a
setting sun.”
In the year of the Convention, the Massachusetts delegate, Elbridge
Gerry, called on Franklin, bringing a friend named Manasseh Cutler.
Later Cutler wrote down his recollections of this first meeting with the
philosopher-statesman.
He was sitting hatless under a mulberry tree in his garden, “a short,
fat, trunched old man in a plain Quaker dress, bald pate, and short
white locks.” Present were several men and women, one of whom was Sarah
Bache. When Cutler was introduced, Franklin rose, took him by the hand,
expressed his joy at seeing him, and begged him to be seated by his
side. He spoke in a low voice and his “countenance was open, frank, and
pleasing.”
Sarah Bache served tea under the tree. She had three of her younger
children with her, who “seemed to be excessively fond of their
grandpapa.” They talked until dark when Franklin took his guests into
his study, “a very large chamber and high-studded.” The walls were lined
with bookshelves and there were more books in four alcoves extending
two-thirds of the length of the room. Cutler guessed rightly that this
was “the largest and by far the best private library in America.”
Their host showed them a sort of artificial arm—a long pole with prongs
at the end that could be opened or shut with a rope, which he had
devised to take down and put up books on the upper shelves. (Previously
he had used a chair which could be unfolded into a ladder, but now he
was not sufficiently agile.) He had other curiosities in the room, such
as a glass machine for “exhibiting the circulation of the blood in the
arteries and veins of the human body” and his rocking armchair, with a
fan placed over it which he could operate by a small motion of his foot.
Because Cutler was a botanist, Franklin showed him a precious folio
containing _Systema Vegetabilium_, by Linnaeus, the founder of
systematic botany. Heavy as the folio was, Franklin insisted on lifting
it himself, and to Cutler he expressed regret that he had not in his
youth given more attention to the science of botany.
They discussed many other matters and Cutler was astonished at
Franklin’s extensive knowledge, “the brightness of his memory, and
clearness and vivacity of all his mental faculties, notwithstanding his
age,” and at the “incessant vein of humour ... which seems as natural
and involuntary as his breathing.”
But his age was catching up with Benjamin Franklin, as no one realized
better than he. In February 1788, he fell on the stone steps that led
into his garden, bruising himself badly and spraining his wrist, so that
temporarily he could not even write to his friends. The accident was
followed by a severe attack of his kidney stone ailment. He was still
confined to bed when Pennsylvania celebrated gloriously its twelfth
Fourth of July. The Pennsylvania Council held meetings at his house
during his illness, and in October, Thomas Mifflin, a veteran of the
Revolutionary War, was elected to succeed him.
To quiet the anxiety of his sister in Boston, Jane Mecom, he wrote,
“There are in life real evils enough, and it is a folly to afflict
ourselves with imaginary ones.... As to the pain I suffer, about which
you make yourself so unhappy, it is, when compared with the long life I
have enjoyed of health and ease, but a trifle.”
He made his will that summer of 1788. In a codicil, he bequeathed to “my
friend, and the friend of mankind, General Washington,” the walking
stick with the gold head in the shape of a cap of liberty, which had
been given him in France as a symbol of victory.
Congress was now allotting many pensions and bonuses to patriots who had
sacrificed their personal interests to serve in the cause of freedom.
Franklin had hoped that his many years of foreign service might be
thought worthy of a grant of a tract of land in the West “which might
have been of some use and some honour to my posterity.” This was never
given him.
Arthur Lee, who had been notably jealous of Franklin and who had written
him vitriolic letters in France accusing him of leaving him out of
things, was a member of the Treasury Board. He had never forgotten or
forgiven Franklin for being the better man. John Adams was finding ears
to listen to his long-standing disapproval of Franklin’s “frivolity.” He
was being criticized for being too fond of France, as he had once been
censored for his attachment to England, and especially for accepting as
a gift the King of France’s miniature. There was also a matter of a
million livres given by France to the dummy importing concern, Hortalez
and Company, which was unaccounted for. Franklin was condemned by
innuendo, though time would clear him completely.
He was sorrowful about this turn of affairs but he blamed nobody. He
knew something of the “nature of such changeable assemblies,” he wrote a
friend, “and how little successors are informed of services that have
been rendered to the corps before their admission.”
Once more he had turned to working on his _Autobiography_, commenced
years before at the Shipley home in England. For six months off and on
he kept at it, even while his kidney stone was causing him such acute
pain he had to resort to opium. He brought his life story up to the time
of his first meetings with the Penn brothers in England. It remained
unfinished.
By the summer of 1789 he was so emaciated that, in his words, “little
remains of me but a skeleton covered with a skin,” and philosophic as
always, commented, “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain
except death and taxes,” tossing off another epigram that would survive.
The long fermenting discontent of the French working classes exploded in
the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Franklin seems not to
have realized the extent of the misery in France during his stay there.
Most of his intimate friends had been wealthy, or at least well-to-do.
His own life had been so idyllic he had come to think of his foster
country almost as a utopia. Moreover, he was deeply grateful to the
French King for his generosity to America.
But his belief in the rights of the common man was firm and if the
people of France felt they needed a change, he was with them. When
rumors of their Revolution reached him, he wrote, “Disagreeable
circumstances might attend the convulsions in France ... but if by the
struggle she obtains and secures for her nation its future liberty, and
a good constitution, a few years’ enjoyment of those blessings will
amply repair all the damages their acquisition may have occasioned.”
Since 1787 he had been president of the Pennsylvania Society for
Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, founded by the Quakers, and his
signature was on a memorial which the society sent to Congress on
February 12, 1790, advocating the abolition of slavery. Congress
dismissed the memorial on the grounds that it had no authority to
interfere in the internal affairs of the states. Whereupon Franklin
promptly published an essay, “On the Slave Trade,” in which a mythical
Algerian, Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim, used the same arguments as the Negro
slave owners to defend his right to Christian slaves! The piece showed
the same barbs of wit and satire as his earlier writings. His campaign
against slavery was his last public activity.
His pain now kept him bedridden, but he did some work, using Benjamin
Bache as his secretary, and he found the energy to listen to his
nine-year-old granddaughter Deborah recite lessons from her Webster
spelling book. In March, Thomas Jefferson, on his way to accept his post
as Secretary of State under President George Washington, came to see
him, and on April 8, he wrote Jefferson his last letter, a clear account
of the map which he and the other peace commissioners used in fixing the
boundary between Maine and Nova Scotia.
He was now running a high temperature. Breathing became so difficult
that he nearly suffocated. When, briefly, he felt a little better, he
rose from his bed, begging that it might be made up fresh for him so he
could die in a decent manner.
His daughter Sally told him she hoped he would recover and live many
years longer.
“I hope not,” he said calmly.
They put him back to bed and his physician advised him to change his
position so he could breathe more easily.
“A dying man can do nothing easy,” he commented.
Soon afterwards he fell in a coma. Temple and Benjamin Bache, his
grandsons, were alone with him when, on April 17, 1790, at the age of
eighty-four and three months, the end came.
His death brought an abrupt halt to the petty recriminations that had
saddened his last months. In Philadelphia, the city that had grown up
with him and because of him, muffled bells tolled, and flags on the
ships in the harbor hung at half mast. Some 20,000 attended his funeral,
the greatest number the city had ever seen gathered in one spot. As he
was lowered into his grave in the Christ Church burying ground beside
his wife, a company of militia artillery fired funeral guns in honor of
the man who had organized Pennsylvania’s first militia.
In New York, by a motion passed unanimously, the United States House of
Representatives voted to wear mourning for a month. Neither the Senate
nor the Executive Council followed the example of the House. Ironically,
the man chosen to pronounce his funeral eulogy at the Lutheran German
Church in Philadelphia was William Smith, his ancient enemy. Although
Smith did not do him justice, the crowd before the pulpit sobbed openly.
But it was in France, his adopted country, where the expressions of
grief and loss were most tumultuous. The National Assembly proclaimed a
period of three months of national mourning for the “benefactor and hero
of humanity.” “Antiquity would have raised altars to this mighty
genius,” cried the revolutionary leader Mirabeau.
Splendid orations in his honor were delivered by the Jacobins, the
Friends of the Constitution, the Academy of Science, the Royal Society
of Medicine, the National Guard, the Masonic lodges, the printers of
France, and uncounted other societies. All over the country, women wept
for him. It is said that one enterprising businessman became rich by
selling statuettes of him, made from the stones of the Bastille.
Franklin’s contributions to his country, to science, to better
understanding between nations and peoples were immense. His maxims on
thrift and moral virtues have been extolled to generations of school
children. His wit and wisdom have added to the world’s riches. He was
many men in one—statesman, scientist, inventor, writer, humorist,
philosopher, and a friend of humanity who shared himself with all around
him.
“Who that know and love you can bear the thoughts of surviving you in
this gloomy world?” cried out Jane Mecom, his beloved sister, shortly
before his death.
Posterity would provide her answer. Because Benjamin Franklin lived and
enjoyed life, the world would be a little less gloomy and a little more
pleasant for all who came after him.
SUGGESTED READING
Aldrich, Alfred Owen, _Franklin and His French Contemporaries_. New
York, New York University Press, 1957.
_The American Heritage Book of the Revolution._ By the Editors of
American Heritage. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1958.
Augur, Helen, _The Secret War of Independence_. New York, Duell, Sloan
and Pearce, 1955.
Burt, Struthers, _Philadelphia Holy Experiment_. New York, Doubleday &
Company, Inc., 1945.
Clark, William Bell, _Ben Franklin’s Privateers_. Baton Rouge, La.,
Louisiana State University Press, 1956.
Fäy, Bernard, _Franklin, the Apostle of Modern Times_. Boston, Little,
Brown, and Company, 1929.
Ford, Paul Leicester, _The Many-Sided Franklin_. New York, The Century
Company, 1899.
_Franklin’s Wit & Folly—the Bagatelles_, edited by Richard E. Amacher.
New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1953.
_A Benjamin Franklin Reader_, edited by Nathan G. Goodman. New York,
Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1945.
_Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiographical Writings_, selected and edited by
Carl Van Doren. New York, The Viking Press, 1945.
_The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin_, with postcript by Richard B.
Morris. New York, The Pocket Library, 1954.
Van Doren, Carl, _Benjamin Franklin_. New York, The Viking Press, 1938.
Van Doren, Carl, _Jane Mecom_. New York, The Viking Press, 1950.
INDEX
A
_Abridgement of the Book of Common Prayer_, 108
Adams, Abigail, 126, 155, 168-69
Adams, John, 126, 138, 140, 155-56, 163, 168-69, 184
Adams, John Quincy, 155
Adams, Matthew, 13
Adams, Samuel, 113
Addison, Joseph, 14
Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, 47
Albany, New York, 64
Alibard, Thomas François d’, 58, 103
American Philosophical Society, 45, 56
André, Major John, 162
Animal magnetism, 173-74
Anton, Franz, 173
Ants, experiment with, 57-58
Arland, Marquis d’, 165-66
Armonica, invention of the, 81
Arnold, General Benedict, 136-37, 161
Articles of Confederation, 179
Auteuil, France, 168
_Autobiography_ of Benjamin Franklin, 34, 108, 141, 184
Azyr, Felix Vicq d’, 172
B
Bache, Benjamin Franklin (Benjamin’s grandson), 107, 123, 142,
148, 155, 175, 176, 178, 185, 186
Bache, Deborah (Benjamin’s granddaughter), 185
Bache, Richard (Benjamin’s son-in-law), 101, 106, 119, 123, 125,
141, 161
Bache, Sarah Franklin (Benjamin’s daughter), 44, 78, 84, 85, 90,
95, 99, 101, 123, 147, 151, 177, 181, 182, 186
Bache, William (Benjamin’s grandson), 123
Balloon ascensions, 165-66
Bancroft, Edward, 153
Bathurst, Lord and Lady, 105
Beaumarchais, Caron de, 145, 152
Beethoven, Ludwig von, 81
Belgium, 81
_Berkshire_, ship, 26
Bermuda, 127-28
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 69
_Black Prince_, privateer, 159
_Black Princess_, privateer, 159
Bond, Dr. Thomas, 56-57
_Bonhomme Richard_, privateer, 160-61
Bonvouloir, Achard de, 134, 135
Boston, Massachusetts, 9-17, 23, 40, 49, 104, 105, 111-13, 115,
119, 123, 126, 139
Boston City Council, 16
Boston _Gazette_, 13
Boston Massacre, 105
Boston Tea Party, 115, 119
Boswell, James, 101
Braddock, General Edward, 65-66, 70, 71
Bradford, Andrew, 17, 19, 32, 33, 35
Bradford, William, 17
Brillon, Madame, 167-68, 176
British Royal Society, 25, 45, 51, 58, 59, 60, 78, 91, 100, 150,
151, 171
Brooklyn Heights, Battle of, 139
Bruere, James, 127, 128
Brussels, Holland, 81
Buffon, Count Georges Louis, 58
Bunker Hill, Battle of, 124
Burgesses, Virginia House of, 94
Burgoyne, General John, 152
Burke, Edmund, 96, 117
Burlington, New Jersey, 19, 48, 57
C
Cabanis, Georges, 172-73
Calgagnia, Jean-François, 51
Canada, 61, 136-37, 152
Canton, John, 59, 78
Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 62
Charles, Jacques-Alexandre-César, 165
Charles II, King, 20
Charleston, South Carolina, 40
Chaumont, Le Ray de, 147, 155
Chaumont, Sophie de, 167
Christian VII, King, 105
Collins (Benjamin’s friend), 17
Collinson, Peter, 51, 53, 55, 58, 59, 74
“Common Sense,” 135-36, 137, 147
Concord, Battle of, 123-24
Constitutional Convention, 179-81
Continental Congress, _see_ First Continental Congress, Second
Continental Congress
Continental Navy, 129;
_see also_ Privateers
Cook, Captain James, 158, 167
Cornwallis, General Charles, 161, 162
_Craven Street Gazette_, 107
Cunaeus, 50
Cushing, Thomas, 112, 113, 118
Cutler, Manasseh, 181-82
D
Dartmouth, Lord, 96, 106, 117
Davies, Marianne, 81
Deane, Silas, 141, 144-45, 152, 153, 155
Declaration of Independence, 137-39, 147
Declaration of Rights and Grievances, 120
Deffand, Marquise du, 145-46
De Lor, 58
Denham, Thomas, 24, 26, 28
Denny, William, 71, 80
“Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout,” 171
Dickinson, John, 133
Dinwiddie, Robert, 64
“Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, A,”
25
_Drake_, H.M.S., 160
Dublin, Ireland, 105
Dubourg, Barbeu, 110, 133, 144
Du Fay, Charles François, 49
Dumas, Charles, 133
Dunning, John, 117
E
Easton, Pennsylvania, 69
“Edict by the King of Prussia,” 114-15
Edwards, Jonathan, 55
Electricity, 49-56, 58-60, 100
Empedocles, 54
England, 24-26, 47, 61, 74-83, 86, 91-99, 100-10, 111-21, 126,
150-51, 152-53, 158-59, 161
“Ephemera,” 167, 171
“Experiments and Observations in Electricity, Made at
Philadelphia, in America,” 58
F
_Fearnot_, privateer, 159
First Continental Congress, 119, 120
Fisher, Daniel, 68
Forbes, Brigadier General, 71
Fort Duquesne, 65, 66, 70-71
Fothergill, Dr. John, 58, 77, 89
Fox, Charles James, 150
France and the French, 47, 61, 64, 65, 67, 82, 93, 103, 126,
133-35, 143-54, 157-64, 165-76, 184-85, 187
Franklin, Abiah (Benjamin’s mother), 9, 40
Franklin, Benjamin, agricultural interests, 57;
ambassador to France, 158-63, 166-76;
birth, 9;
book publisher, 42;
boyhood, 9-17;
Braddock and, 65-67;
children, 38, 44;
civic improvements suggested by, 46-47, 56-57;
clerk to Pennsylvania Assembly, 41;
commissioner to France, 141, 143-54;
continental trips, 81, 101, 103-04;
courtship, 20, 34, 169;
death, 186;
Declaration of Independence and, 137-38;
delegate to Constitutional Convention, 179-81;
delegate to Second Continental Congress, 124-31, 132-41;
education, 10, 40;
educational proposals, 45-46;
electrical experiments, 51-56, 58-60, 100;
England visited by, 24-26, 74-83, 91-121;
founder of American Philosophical Society, 44-45;
France visited by, 103;
friendships in England, 100-10;
funeral of, 186;
honors, 60, 79, 81, 166-67, 177, 186-87;
Hutchinson letters and, 112-13, 115-18;
illnesses, 77-78, 93, 107, 137, 163, 164, 171, 183, 184,
185;
inventions, 11, 43-44, 45, 80-81, 178;
journey to Philadelphia, 18-19;
library for public established by, 34-35;
marriage, 34;
Masonic leader, 35, 56;
meeting with Richard Howe, 140-41;
military career, 68-71;
musical interests, 10, 81;
old age, 166-76, 177-86;
peace negotiations with England, 163;
Penn family and, 76-77, 80, 89-90, 91-92;
Pennsylvania Hospital established by, 57;
personal appearance, 11, 20, 42-43, 75, 111, 143-44, 153,
181-82;
postmaster-general of the colonies, 63, 118, 125;
postmaster of Philadelphia, 41;
printer in Philadelphia, 19-24, 29-30, 31-37, 40, 42, 47;
printer’s apprentice, 12-17;
publisher of the Courant in Boston, 16;
religious beliefs, 35, 180;
retirement, 47-48;
scientific interests, 26-27, 33, 49, 51-56, 57-60, 78, 100,
108-10, 121-22, 171-74, 182;
Stamp Act and, 92-99;
summoned before King’s Privy Council, 116-17;
vegetarian diet, 14, 18;
verse-making, 13-14, 43;
virtues, thirteen, 38-40, 41;
Voltaire and, 157;
will of, 183
Franklin, Benjamin (Benjamin’s uncle), 10
Franklin, Deborah Read (Benjamin’s wife), 20, 24, 25, 28, 34,
37, 43-44, 68, 69-70, 71, 74-75, 78, 84, 90, 95, 99,
101, 105, 107, 121
Franklin, Elizabeth (William’s wife), 85
Franklin, Francis Folger (Benjamin’s son), 38, 41, 44
Franklin, James (Benjamin’s brother), 12-13, 14, 15, 16-17, 23,
28, 40-41
Franklin, Jane, _see_ Mecom, Jane Franklin
Franklin, John (Benjamin’s brother), 42, 63
Franklin, Josiah (Benjamin’s father), 9, 10, 11-12, 14, 23, 40,
42, 105
Franklin, Lydia (Benjamin’s sister), 9
Franklin, Peter (Benjamin’s brother), 42, 63
Franklin, Sally (Benjamin’s cousin), 107
Franklin, Sarah (Sally), _see_ Bache, Sarah Franklin
Franklin, William (Benjamin’s son), 38, 44, 47, 59, 63, 65, 68,
71, 77-78, 81-83, 85, 95, 108, 119, 128, 139, 176
Franklin, William Temple (Benjamin’s grandson), 107, 111, 121,
123, 128, 139, 141, 148, 150, 152, 157, 158, 160, 171,
175, 176, 178, 186
Franklin Stove, 44, 45, 90
Frederick the Great, 114
Freedom of the press, 17, 35
Freemasonry, 35
French, Colonel, 21-22, 24
French and Indian Wars, 65, 86
French Academy of Sciences, 157, 171, 172
French Revolution, 184-85
French Royal Academy, 107
G
Gage, General Thomas, 115
Galloway, Joseph, 89, 141
Gates, General Horatio, 161
Gebelin, Count de, 171-72
George III, King, 81, 92, 93, 101, 104, 118, 120, 124, 132, 150,
151, 162
Gérard, Conrad-Alexandre, 152, 153
German Royal Academy of Sciences, 101
Germantown, Pennsylvania, 88
Gerry, Elbridge, 181
Gibbon, Edward, 148
Glover, John, 139
Gnadenhuetten, Pennsylvania, 68, 69
Göttingen, Germany, 101
Greene, Catherine Ray, 67, 85-86, 162, 168
Greene, General Nathanael, 162
Greene, William, 67, 86
Grenville, Lord George, 75-76, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97
Gruet, M., 144
Guillotin, Joseph-Ignace, 174
Gulf Stream, 121-22
H
Hadley, John, 78
Hall, David, 47
Hamilton, Andrew, 32
Hamilton, James, 62, 69
Hancock, John, 138
Harrison, Benjamin, 130, 133
Hartley, David, 158
Havre, France, 175, 176
Harvard College, 10, 15, 45, 60
Hell Fire Club, 12
Helvétius, Madame, 168-69, 176
Henry, Patrick, 94
Hessians, 139, 148
Hewitt, James, 97
Hewson, Polly Stevenson, 75, 85, 91, 103, 107, 118, 174
Hewson, William, 107, 118
Hillsborough, Earl of, 104, 106, 117
Holland, 81, 161
Holmes, Robert, 21, 22
Hortalez and Company, 144-45, 146, 184
Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 157
Howe, Admiral Lord Richard, 120, 139-40, 167
Howe, General Sir William, 123, 124, 126, 139, 151
Hughes, John, 93, 94
Hume, David, 79
Hunter, William, 63
Hutchinson, Thomas, 112, 113, 116
Hutchinson Letters, 112-13, 115-18
Hypnotism, 174
I
Indians, American, 61-62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 86-88, 125, 170,
171-72, 178
“Information to Those who would Remove to America,” 169-70
Ingenhousz, Jan, 171
Ingersoll, Jared, 93, 95
Insurance company, 57
Ireland, 105
J
Jay, John, 133, 163
Jay, Maria 163
Jefferson, Thomas, 124, 138, 141, 174, 175, 185-86
Johnson, Samuel, 101
Johnson, Thomas, 133
Jones, John Paul, 160-61
Junto, the, 30-31, 34, 43, 46, 52, 88, 123
K
Kames, Lord Henry Home, 79, 89, 95, 102
Keimer, Samuel, 19-20, 21, 22, 24, 29, 33
Keith, Sir William, 21-22, 23, 24, 31, 71
_King of Prussia_, ship, 91
Kinnersley, Ebenezer, 52-53
Kleist, E. C. von, 50
Knox, Henry, 126
L
_Lady Catherine_, ship, 127, 128
Lafayette, Marquis de, 150, 162
Laurens, Henry, 162
Laurens, Colonel John, 162
Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent, 171, 174
Le Despencer, Lord, 108, 114, 117
Lee, Arthur, 141, 145, 153, 155, 183
Lee, “Light-Horse Harry,” 162
Lee, Richard Henry, 137
_Letters on Philosophical Subjects_, 110
Lexington, Battle of, 123
Leyden jar, 50-51, 81, 171
_Lighthouse Tragedy, The_, 13
Lightning rods, 55-56, 58, 60, 90, 150-51
Linnaeus, 182
Livingston, Robert, 138
London, England, 24-26, 74
London _Journal_, 16
London _Spectator_, 14
Lorraine, Prince of, 81
Loudon, Lord, 71
Louis XV, King, 51, 59, 103-04, 105
Louis XVI, King, 146, 153, 154, 173, 175, 185
Lynch, Thomas, 130
M
Marchant, Captain Stephen, 159
Marie Antoinette, Queen, 81, 154
Marion, Francis, 162
Massachusetts Assembly, 104, 112, 113, 117, 118
Massachusetts Committee of Safety, 123
Mather, Cotton, 12
Mecom, Edward, 40
Mecom, Jane Franklin (Benjamin’s daughter), 9, 10, 40, 130-31,
183, 187
Meredith, Hugh, 29-30, 31-32
Mesmer, Dr., 174
Mifflin, Thomas, 183
Militia, Pennsylvania, 47, 68-71, 88, 125
Minutemen, 123-24
Mirabeau, Count de, 187
Montgomery, General Richard, 136
Montreal, Canada, 136, 137
Moravians, 68, 69, 86
Morgan, Daniel, 162
Morris, Robert, 128-29
Morris, Robert Hunter, 68, 70-71
Mozart, Wolfgang, 81
Musschenbroek, Pieter van, 50, 81
N
Nairne, Edward, 171
Nantes, France, 143-44
“Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County,” 87
“Nature and Necessity of Paper Money, The,” 32
New Castle, Pennsylvania, 47
_New England Courant_, 13, 15, 16
Newport, Rhode Island, 40, 53
Newton, Sir Isaac, 25
New York City, 17, 71, 137, 186-87
Nollet, Abbé Jean-Antoine, 51
North, Lord, 104, 125
Northwest Passage, search for, 57
O
Oliver, Andrew, 112, 113, 116
“On the Slave Trade,” 185
Oxford University, 81
P
Paine, Thomas, 119, 135-36, 138, 147, 162, 164, 178
Palmer (London printer), 25
Paper currency, 32
Paris, Ferdinand John, 77
Paris, France, 144, 161, 165
Paris, Treaty of (1763), 86
Paris, Treaty of (1783), 163
Passy, France, 151, 152, 155, 162, 163, 165, 167-69, 172, 175-76
Paxton Boys, 86-87, 88-89
Peabody, Mrs., 14
Penal code revision, 178
Penn, John, 76, 87, 88, 89, 90
Penn, Richard, 76
Penn, Thomas, 61, 62, 68, 70, 76-77, 89
Penn, William, 20, 21, 61, 62, 76, 87, 110
Pennsylvania Academy, 46, 79, 139
Pennsylvania Assembly, 32, 41, 47, 56, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 76,
79, 80, 85, 87, 89, 99, 125, 177, 178
_Pennsylvania Gazette_, 33, 35-36, 41, 42, 60, 64
Pennsylvania Hospital, 57
_Pennsylvania Magazine_, 135
_Pennsylvania Packet_, ship, 121
Perth Amboy, New Jersey, 19
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 18, 19, 20-21, 26, 27, 32, 46-47,
87, 110, 123, 125, 177, 179, 186
Philadelphia City Council, 56
_Philadelphia Gazette_, 56
_Pilgrim’s Progress_, 10
Pinel, Philippe, 168
Pitt, William (Lord Chatham), 80, 101-02, 104, 120
“Plain Truth,” 47
_Plutarch’s Lives_, 10
Police force, Philadelphia, 46
_Poor Richard’ s Almanack_, 36-37, 42, 56, 60, 73-74
Portsmouth, England, 109
Pratt, Charles, 77, 80
Priestley, Joseph, 100, 117, 118, 121, 131, 171, 173
Pringle, Sir John, 78, 100-01, 103-04, 150, 151
Privateers, 159-61
“Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge Among British
Plantations in North America,” 44-45
“Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,”
45-46
_Public Advertiser_, London, 113, 116
Puysegur, Marquis de, 174
Pyrmont, Germany, 101
Q
Quebec, Canada, 136
Queensberry, Duke of, 117
Quincy, Josiah, 136, 163-64
R
Ralph, James, 21, 24, 25
Rancocas, New Jersey, 178
_Ranger_, privateer, 160
Raspe, Rudolf Erich, 101
Ray, Catherine, _see_ Greene, Catherine Ray
Read, Deborah, _see_ Franklin, Deborah Read
“Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” 170
_Reprisal_, sloop, 142, 143
Revere, Paul, 123
Revolutionary War, 123-31, 132-42, 147, 148, 149-50, 151-52,
157, 158-63
Rochambeau, General, 162
Rockingham, Marquis of, 94, 96, 101, 150
Rozier, Pilâtre de, 165
“Rules by Which a Great Empire may be Reduced to a Small One,”
113-14, 115
Rush, Dr. Benjamin, 57
Rutledge, Edward, 140
Ryan, Luke, 159
S
St. Andrews University, 79
St. Eustatius, West Indies, 129, 161
St. George, Bermuda, 127
Sandwich, Earl of, 117
Saratoga, Battle of, 152
_Savannah Pacquet_, ship, 127, 128
Scotland, 79
Scotosh, Chief, 178
Second Continental Congress, 124-30, 132-41, 151, 157-58, 161,
163, 166, 174, 175, 178, 179, 183, 185
_Serapis_, H.M.S., 161
Shelburne, Earl of, 103, 104, 108, 175
Sherman, Roger, 138
Shipley, Jonathan, 107-08
Shipley, Kitty, 111
Shirley, Governor, 67
Six Nations, 62, 64, 87
Slaves and slavery, 9, 16, 36, 75, 138, 185
Sloane, Sir Hans, 25
Smallpox epidemics, 13, 41, 86
Smith, Adam, 79
Smith, William, 79, 84, 187
Socrates, 14-15, 20
Sons of Liberty, 94
Soulavie, Abbé, 172
Southampton, England, 176
Spain, 47, 126, 152
Spencer, Dr. Adam, 49
Stamp Act, 92-99, 102
Steele, Richard, 14
Steuben, Baron von, 150
Stevenson, Margaret, 75, 77, 91, 99, 107, 174
Stevenson, Polly, _see_ Hewson, Polly Stevenson
Storage battery, 52-53
Stormont, Lord, 147, 148, 158
Strahan, William, 74, 132-33
Sullivan, General John, 140
Swaine, Captain Charles, 57
Swift, Jonathan, 26
Synge, Philip, 52
T
Temple, John, 115-16, 117
Townshend, Charles, 102, 104
Townshend Acts, 102, 104
Trenton, Battle of, 148
Tryon, Mr., 14, 18
Tucker, Colonel Henry, 127
Turgot, Baron, 157, 168
U
Union Fire Company of Philadelphia, 47
_Universal Instructor in All Arts and Science, and Pennsylvania
Gazette_, 33
V
Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, 150
Vergennes, Count Charles Gravier de, 134, 135, 145, 146, 151,
152, 153, 154
Versailles, France, 104, 145, 154
Virginia Resolves, 94
Voltaire, 157, 168
W
Walking Purchase, the, 61-62
Warwick, Rhode Island, 130
Washington, General George, 64, 65, 66, 71, 124, 126, 130, 135,
137, 139, 148, 150, 162, 178, 179, 183, 185
Watt (London printer), 25
“Way to Wealth, The,” 74, 110, 147
Wedderburn, Alexander, 117-18
Wentworth, Paul, 152-53
Whately, William, 115, 116, 117
Whig Club, 80
“Whistle, The,” 171
Whitehead, Paul, 114-15
William and Mary College, 45, 60
Williamsburg, Virginia, 45, 94
Wilson, Benjamin, 150, 162
Wilson, James, 180
Wygate (Benjamin’s London friend), 25-26
Wyndham, Sir William, 26
X
Xenophon’s _Memorabilia_, 14
Y
Yale College, 45, 60
Yorke, Charles, 77, 80
Yorktown, Battle of, 162
Z
Zenger, Peter, 17
THE _Lives to Remember_ SERIES
Lives To Remember is a series of concise biographies introducing the
world’s great men and women.
HELEN KELLER
by J. W. and Anne Tibble
NOBODY STOPS CUSHING
by Frank Cetin
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by Patrick Moore
FRIDTJOF NANSEN
Arctic Explorer
by Francis Noel-Baker
DOUGLAS MacARTHUR
by Alfred Steinberg
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
by Alfred Steinberg
WOODROW WILSON
by Alfred Steinberg
DOROTHEA LYNDE DIX
by Gertrude Norman
MADAME CURIE
by Robin McKown
ALBERT EINSTEIN
by Arthur Beckhard
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
by Manuel Komroff
CHARLES STEINMETZ
by Henry Thomas
DANIEL WEBSTER
by Alfred Steinberg
ADMIRAL RICHARD E. BYRD
by Alfred Steinberg
THE WRIGHT BROTHERS
by Henry Thomas
GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE
by Henry Thomas
ULYSSES S. GRANT
by Henry Thomas
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
by Henry Thomas
BILLY MITCHELL
by Arch Whitehouse
GEORGE GERSHWIN
by Edward Jablonski
THOMAS PAINE
by Robin McKown
JOHN MARSHALL
by Alfred Steinberg
ALEXANDER HAMILTON
by William Wise
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
by Robin McKown
HARRY S. TRUMAN
by Alfred Steinberg
JOHN J. PERSHING
by Arch Whitehouse
THADDEUS LOWE
by Lydel Sims
SOCRATES
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GEORGE GERSHWIN _by Edward Jablonski_
BILLY MITCHELL _by Arch Whitehouse_
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT _by Henry Thomas_
ULYSSES S. GRANT _by Henry Thomas_
WOODROW WILSON _by Alfred Steinberg_
DOUGLAS MacARTHUR _by Alfred Steinberg_
THE AUTHOR
Robin McKown was born in Denver and attended the University of Colorado,
Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois. She sold her
first one-act play to a literary magazine while she was still in
college, and later won a drama prize at the University of Colorado. She
has worked in public relations, with a literary agency, and prepared
radio scripts. Mrs. McKown is the author of _Thomas Paine_ and _Marie
Curie_, both in the Lives to Remember series, as well as _Publicity
Girl_ and _Foreign Service Girl_. She makes her home in New York City.
_Other Books by Robin McKown_
THOMAS PAINE
MARIE CURIE
FOREIGN SERVICE GIRL
PUBLICITY GIRL
ROOSEVELT’S AMERICA
WASHINGTON’S AMERICA
THE FABULOUS ISOTOPES
GIANT OF THE ATOM: _Ernest Rutherford_
SHE LIVED FOR SCIENCE: _Irène Joliot-Curie_
JANINE
THE ORDEAL OF ANNE DEVLIN
AUTHOR’S AGENT
PAINTER OF THE WILD WEST: _Frederick Remington_
PIONEERS IN MENTAL HEALTH
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Few men have more claims to greatness than Benjamin Franklin. He was in
his long lifetime, writer, editor and publisher, scientist and inventor,
propagandist for the cause of the American colonies, statesman,
diplomat. He was a wit and a humorist, a loyal friend and a good family
man. From his birth in Boston as the son of a poor candlemaker to his
election by Congress as America’s first ambassador to France and his
subsequent return to the United States, the author traces the
fascinating development of an impetuous and saucy youth who became a
beloved man both on his native soil and throughout the world.
Transcriber’s Notes
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