Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

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.