The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (14 page)

The plan was sent to the colonies for their approval, to be followed by confirmation by the king and Parliament. Franklin confessed that he had no idea how the assemblies or the home government would view the plan. Within a few months he realized that the prospects were not good. The colonial assemblies were not willing to adopt any plan of union at all. Even the Pennsylvania Assembly refused to go along with the Albany proposal. He had come to realize that the colonies would never unite without pressure from the mother country. Although everyone cried that a union was “absolutely necessary,” the “weak Noodles” who dominated the colonial assemblies were too distracted to act. “So if ever there be a Union,” he told Peter Collinson in December 1754, “it must be form’d by the Ministry and Parliament. I doubt not that they will make a good one.”
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But the ministry (or what later would be called the cabinet) and Parliament were no more eager to adopt the Albany Plan than the colonial assemblies, and officials in Britain rejected it as well. Although most Americans in 1754 could scarcely conceive of the colonies’ becoming independent from Great Britain, many British officials continued to worry, as they had for decades, that the colonies were becoming too rich and strong to be governed any longer from London.
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Bringing the colonies together in any way seemed to make such a possibility more likely. The Speaker of the House of Commons warned the Duke of Newcastle, the official responsible for American affairs, of the “ill consequences to be apprehended from uniting too closely the northern colonies with each other, an Independency upon this country to be feared from such an union.”
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With such opinions flying about it is not surprising that the British government dismissed the Albany Plan out of hand. As Franklin later recalled, “Its Fate was singular. The Assemblies did not adopt it as they all thought there was too much [crown]
Prerogative
in it; and in England it was judg’d to have too much of the
Democratic
.”
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Despite the failure of his Albany Plan, the whole experience of making plans for the empire was exhilarating. Being deputy postmaster for North America could not compare with this kind of top-level participation in imperial affairs. When word spread of Franklin’s major involvement in drawing up the plan of union, prominent imperial officials were eager to talk with him. One of these was William Shirley, royal governor of Massachusetts, who became commander in chief of the British forces in North America in 1755. Franklin had not previously met Shirley but knew him to be “a wise, good and worthy Man,” who, as governor, had been “made the Subject of some public virulent and senseless Libels.”
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Acquiring these kinds of imperial connections was a heady experience for Franklin, and he could not help feeling some pride. He was eager to tell his son that during his meeting with Governor Shirley in 1754 the governor had been “particularly civil to me.”
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He presumably began exchanging views with Shirley over the nature of the British Empire and the kind of union that might be possible in North America. Apparently, Shirley proposed that the colonial assemblies be bypassed not only in establishing a general government but also in the administering of such a government. Franklin admitted that a “general Government might be as well and faithfully administer’d without the people, as with them,” but he reminded Shirley that “where heavy burthens are to be laid on them, it has been found useful to make it, as much as possible, their own act.”
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The colonists themselves, he argued, knew better the needs of the colonies for defense than did the distant Parliament. Franklin said all this at the very moment he was telling his friend Collinson that the colonial assemblies were so fuzzy-headed that the ministry and Parliament not only had to impose a plan of union on the colonies but would do it right. This raises the question of just how sincere he was with Shirley, or whether he in fact then wrote this to Shirley at all. (His three letters to Shirley in December 1754 were printed in a London newspaper in 1766, but the originals in Franklin’s hand do not survive.)
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If he did write this to Shirley that winter, he was sufficiently confident of himself to tell a crown-appointed governor to his face that such royal governors were not to be trusted to look after the colonists’ interests. Royal governors, he informed Governor Shirley, were “not always Men of the best Abilities and Integrity, have no Estates here, nor any natural Connections with us,” and “often come to the Colonies merely to make Fortunes, with which they intend to return to Britain.” He went on to remind Shirley “that it is suppos’d an undoubted Right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own Consent given thro’ their Representatives.” Since the colonists had no representatives in Parliament, for Parliament to tax the colonists “would be treating them as a conquer’d People, and not as true British Subjects.”
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In reply, Shirley suggested that the colonists might be granted representation in Parliament. Franklin liked this idea, as long as the colonists “had a reasonable number of Representatives allowed them; and that all the old Acts of Parliament restraining the trade or cramping the manufacturing of the Colonies, be at the same time repealed, and the British Subjects on this side the water put, in those respects, on the same footing with those in Great Britain.” What he wanted above all in 1754 was for the people of Great Britain and the people of the colonies to “learn to consider themselves, not as belonging to different Communities with different Interests, but to one Community with one Interest.” This plea for treating the colonists as equals of those living in England itself was a measure of Franklin’s heightened sense of his own personal equality with nearly anyone in the British Empire. Once he actually began meeting some of the so-called great men of the empire, such as Lord Loudoun, he came to realize that they had no more ability than he had.
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PENNSYLVANIA POLITICS

When the French and Indian War (or the Seven Years War, as it was called in Europe) began in 1754 with the expedition into the Ohio Valley by a young Virginia militia colonel named George Washington, Franklin inevitably became involved. By the next year, when the British government sent General Edward Braddock with two regiments of regulars to engage the French in the interior, Franklin had already persuaded the Pennsylvania Assembly to create a land bank to finance the war effort. The assembly deputed Franklin to meet with Braddock, disabuse him of his prejudices against Pennsylvania, and explain to him just how much the colony was contributing to the war effort. When Braddock discovered that he was short of horses and wagons to haul his expedition westward, Franklin offered to gather the horses and wagons and to stand bond for them personally. That Braddock’s expedition ended in a shocking disaster in July 1755 was not Franklin’s fault; he had warned the arrogant general that frontier warfare would not be easy.

By the fall of 1755 the situation had become desperate. Frontier defenses had collapsed, westerners were fleeing eastward in droves, and with virtually no military force to stop them French-inspired hostile Indians were closing within a day’s ride of Philadelphia. Thoroughly alarmed, the Pennsylvania Assembly finally authorized expenditures for defense, and to raise the money passed a bill taxing all the property in the colony, including the proprietary estates. Under instructions from the proprietors in England, the governor vetoed the bill.

Thus were renewed the increasingly angry exchanges between the governor and the legislature over the issue of taxing the proprietors’ lands, with Franklin writing most of the assembly’s messages. Franklin later recalled that “our Answers as well as his Messages were often tart, and sometimes indecently abusive.”
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But as much as Franklin abused the governor, it was the proprietors, especially Thomas Penn, who really aroused his ire. That the proprietors, who were subjects of the king as well as he, refused to pay taxes on their lands in Pennsylvania along with everyone else galled Franklin to no end.

But something had to be done, and Franklin worked out a compromise that allowed the governor and legislature to agree to the organization of a militia. Unlike Franklin’s Militia Association of 1747, this army was public and legal, though military men regarded its democratic organization with soldiers electing their own officers as absurd. Franklin not only wrote a public defense of the militia but also took charge of raising the troops. With no military title this corpulent forty-nine-year-old civilian led a commission escorted by fifty mounted militiamen to the northwest frontier of the province in order to organize its defense. Governor Robert Morris of Pennsylvania finally recognized Franklin’s military role, and in January 1756 formally appointed him sole military commander of that area of the frontier. After overseeing the building of several forts, Franklin got word that the assembly was convening and he was needed back in Philadelphia. Franklin later recalled that the governor even proposed making him a general in charge of provincial troops to do what Braddock had failed to do and take Fort Duquesne.
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He could hardly help thinking that he had become a kind of indispensable one-man government for the colony

All this, together with the accolades he was receiving at the same time for his scientific accomplishments, was enough to turn any man’s head, and Franklin began to become pretty full of himself. When later that year he was elected once again to the colonelcy of the militia regiment, he accepted gladly and was even escorted by his regiment with drawn swords, an honor never paid to the proprietor of Pennsylvania or to any of the colony’s governors, as Franklin delighted in pointing out.
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Rumors reached Thomas Penn in London of the incident, and it alarmed him. He had earlier thought Franklin a dangerous man, and Franklin’s presuming to be escorted with drawn swords, “as if he had been a member of the Royal Family or Majesty itself,” made Penn even more suspicious of this parvenu printer.
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Penn’s confidants in Pennsylvania told him that Franklin was trying to dupe everyone in order to take over all power in the province.
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Even Franklin’s friends were distressed that he seemed to be overreaching himself. Colden found Franklin’s conduct “most surprising,” and alerted Collinson. When a worried Collinson wrote Franklin about his display of arrogance, Franklin dismissed the matter. “The People happen to love me. Perhaps that’s my Fault.” Besides, he had nothing but contempt for the proprietors and had “not the least Inclination to be in their good Graces.” They were petty and mean men, and he had a “natural Dislike to Persons” like them. His opposition to the proprietors was based not on personal pique or resentment but on his “Regard to the Publick Good.” He may be mistaken about what that public good may be, he told Collinson, “but at least I mean well.” That’s more than could be said for the proprietors. He was ashamed for them. They should have become “Demi Gods” in the eyes of the people; instead they have “become the Objects of universal Hatred and Contempt.” Despite all the power their charter, laws, and wealth gave them, “a private Person (forgive your Friend a little Vanity),” he said to Collinson, was able to “do more Good in their Country than they.” And this “private Person” was able to do so much more than the proprietors “because he has the Affections and Confidence of their People, and of course some Command of the Peoples Purses.”
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By 1756 Franklin must have thought he was on top of the world. No one had seen more of America, and no one knew more important people in the colonies, than he. He was in a position, he thought, to accomplish extraordinary things. “Life,” he wrote that year, was “like a dramatic Piece” and thus “should not only be conducted with Regularity, but methinks it should finish handsomely. Being now in the last Act, I begin to cast about for something fit to end with.”
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Of course, he could scarcely have foreseen how handsomely it would end. At this point in the drama of his life he wanted only to help shape the future of the entity he most admired—the British Empire.

In 1754, while formulating the Albany Plan, he had envisioned two new colonies being created in the West “between the present frontiers of our colonies on one side, and the lakes and Mississippi on the other.” These colonies, he said, would lead “to the great increase of Englishmen, English trade, and English power.” The Crown should grant to the contributors and settlers of these colonies “as many and as great privileges and powers of government... as his Majesty in his wisdom shall think for their benefit and encouragement, consistent with the general good of the British empire.”
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This dream of landed empires in the West was one he long clung to and one he shared with his son William. Two years later he fantasized with his friend the evangelical preacher George Whitefield about their being “jointly employ’d by the Crown to settle a Colony on the Ohio.... What a glorious Thing it would be, to settle in that fine country a large Strong Body of Religious and Industrious People! What a Security to the Other Colonies: and Advantageous to Britain, by Increasing her People, Territory, Strength, and Commerce.” He and Whitefield could spend the remainder of their lives in such an endeavor, and “God would bless us with Success, if we undertook it with a sincere Regard to his Honour, the Service of our gracious King, and (which is the same thing) the Publick Good.”
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MISSION TO GREAT BRITAIN

Franklin was very much the loyal Englishman. Although few Americans in the 1750s expressed anything other than deep loyalty to the mother country, Franklin did seem to have an unusual degree of confidence in his gracious king. He was in fact coming to believe that royal authority might even supplant the proprietary government of Pennsylvania.

With the legislature and the governor continuing to wrangle over the issue of taxing the proprietary lands, the assembly early in 1757 decided to send a mission to England to argue its case with the proprietors and, if that should fail, with the British government. The assembly’s ostensible aim was to get the proprietors to change their attitude toward taxing their lands and to cease issuing oppressive instructions to their gubernatorial appointees; but behind the negotiations with the proprietors lay the threat of seeking to have Parliament remove the Penns from control of Pennsylvania.