The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (101 page)

Shortly after his return from London, Franklin had been elected by the Assembly to be president of its Committee of Public Safety. For a few months he tended assiduously to the committee’s affairs, but his mission to Massachusetts and his other work for the Continental Congress cut into the time he could devote to the Pennsylvania committee, and in February 1776 he resigned.

This did not prevent his supporters in Philadelphia from electing him to a convention called in the summer of 1776 to write a new constitution for the state of Pennsylvania. The Declaration had dissolved the connections between the colonies and Britain and presumably nullified their colonial charters; the new states now set to work, with various degrees of dispatch, writing new charters. Pennsylvania’s convention met on July 15, and on the following day it unanimously selected Franklin as its president.

For the next two months he alternated between the Congress and the convention—which conveniently met in the same building, the State House. As president of the convention he presided rather than participated directly; the heavy drafting he left to others. He did express strong support for perhaps the most distinctive feature of the constitution that emerged: the unicameral legislature. A legislature with two houses was like a wagon with two teams, he said. Where some conservatives took this idea as reassurance—that each team would check the other and prevent the people from running off with the government—Franklin saw equal likelihood that they would negate each other’s effort and thereby prevent the people from enacting needed measures, in much the way the Penns had prevented the Assembly from acting on the people’s behalf. In supporting a single house, Franklin manifested his faith in the people to govern themselves.

This same
faith informed his principal contribution to a renewed debate in the Congress over articles of confederation for the United States as a whole. A central sticking point involved representation, specifically whether representatives would be apportioned by states, on the one hand, or by population (or wealth, its rough equivalent), on the other. Franklin urged the latter, on grounds of both equity and practicality. He was not quite a democrat, in the sense of thinking every person had a right to an equal voice in government. But he predicted that a confederation that countenanced gross disproportions in shared burdens between citizens of different states would not last. “Let the smaller colonies give equal money and men,” he said, “and then have an equal vote. But if they have an equal vote without bearing equal burdens, a confederation upon such iniquitous principles will never last long.”

Franklin lost this argument—and lived long enough to see his prediction prove true, when the confederation based on the one-state, one-vote principle came undone. On a related question he looked similarly to the future. If representation were not to be by states but by population or wealth, how should slaves be measured? By numbers, as people, or value, as property? The issue became moot at this time with the choice of representation by states, but in the discussion the question arose whether a state with many slaves was stronger than a state with few slaves, in the way that a state with many sheep or cattle was stronger than a state with few such livestock. Supporters of slavery, likening slaves to sheep, explicitly or implicitly judged slaves a net addition to states’ strength.

Franklin disagreed tersely. “Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the state,” he said, “and there is therefore some difference between them and sheep. Sheep will never make insurrections.”

Franklin
had to break off constitution-making to tend to the hostilities at hand. Eighteen months earlier, when Lord Howe had consulted with Franklin on a plan for reconciliation, the British government had displayed no interest; now, after a year of fighting, Howe—an admiral as well as a lord, and currently the commander-in-chief for America—was on his way from London with an offer of peace. Franklin had been his American contact then; Franklin became his American contact again. Two weeks after Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, Franklin received a letter from his erstwhile interlocutor. “My Worthy Friend,” began the letter, which proceeded to express Howe’s earnest wish for “the reestablishment of lasting peace and union with the colonies.” As means to this end, Howe informed Franklin and the Congress, he and his fellow peace commissioner—his brother, General William Howe—were authorized to offer amnesty to all Americans who renewed their allegiance to the Crown, to suspend hostilities against those colonies evincing a desire for peace, and to reward those persons who assisted in the restoration of order.

Franklin turned Howe’s letter over to John Hancock and asked the Congress president that it be read to the body. After this was done, the Congress authorized Franklin to respond. He did so in a manner that left no doubt whatsoever that Howe had come a long way to no purpose.
Nor did Howe have any difficulty discerning the anger that still burned in Franklin. “Directing pardons to be offered the colonies, who are the very parties injured,” Franklin wrote, “expresses indeed that opinion of our ignorance, baseness and insensibility which your uninformed and proud nation has long been pleased to entertain of us; but it can have no other effect than that of increasing our resentment.” The Declaration’s litany of British crimes had not yet reached the king; Franklin supplied a short summary. “It is impossible we should think of submission to a government that has with the most wanton barbarity and cruelty burnt our defenceless towns in the midst of winter, excited the savages to massacre our farmers, and our slaves to murder their masters, and is even now bringing foreign mercenaries to deluge our settlements with blood.” If Americans could never forgive such injuries, neither could they realistically expect the British to forgive the assertion of American rights. “And this must impel you, were we again under your government, to endeavour breaking our spirit by the severest tyranny, and obstructing by every means in your power our growing strength and prosperity.” Franklin could describe what Britain needed to do to restore peace, but he would be wasting his time. “I know too well her abounding pride and deficient wisdom to believe she will ever take such salutary measures. Her fondness for conquest as a warlike nation, her lust of dominion as an ambitious one, and her thirst for a gainful monopoly as a commercial one (none of them legitimate causes of war), will all join to hide from her eyes every view of her true interests.”

Franklin considered Howe a personal friend, and in this letter he got personal.

Long did I endeavour with unfeigned and unwearied zeal to preserve from breaking that fine and noble China vase, the British empire. For I knew that being once broken, the separate parts could not retain even their share of the strength or value that existed in the whole, and that a perfect re-union of those parts could scarce even be hoped for. Your Lordship may possibly remember the tears of joy that wet my cheek when, at your good sister’s in London, you once gave me expectations that a reconciliation might soon take place. I had the misfortune to find those expectations disappointed, and to be treated as the cause of the mischief I was labouring to prevent.

Franklin averred his respect for Howe as a gentleman, but even gentlemen had to take responsibility for their actions. The present war against America was unwise and unjust.

And I am persuaded cool, dispassionate posterity will condemn to infamy those who advised it, and that even success will not save from some degree of dishonour those who voluntarily engaged to conduct it. I know your great motive in coming hither was the hope of being instrumental in a reconciliation; and I believe when you find
that
impossible on any terms given you to propose, you will relinquish so odious a command and return to a more honourable private station.

Howe apparently was shocked by the vehemence of Franklin’s letter. “I watched his countenance, and observed him often to express marks of surprise,” recorded the emissary who delivered the letter. “When he had finished reading it, he said his old friend had expressed himself very warmly.” The emissary—an officer from Washington’s headquarters, through which Franklin’s reply reached Howe—inquired whether there was a response. “He declined, saying the doctor had grown too warm, and if he expressed his sentiments fully to him, he should only give him pain, which he wished to avoid.”

Eventually Howe did reply, first by letter to Franklin directly, then by a lately captured American officer, John Sullivan. Since the winter of 1775–76 the main theater of the war had shifted from New England to New York. In March the British evacuated Boston; General Howe pulled all his troops (and some thousand Loyalists) back to Halifax. Three months later he redeployed to the mouth of the Hudson River, landing at Staten Island on the same day the draft of the Declaration of Independence was laid before the Congress. Shortly thereafter Admiral Howe arrived with a large fleet and many more troops.

Washington had anticipated the redirection of British forces and marched his army south. But he was outnumbered and, after General Howe moved 20,000 troops east to Long Island, outflanked. In sharp fighting the British inflicted a major defeat on the Americans; only a skillful nighttime crossing of the East River to Manhattan averted the wholesale destruction of the American army.

Admiral Howe judged the aftermath of the battle of Long Island propitious for a parley. He paroled General Sullivan, the senior American
prisoner, to Philadelphia to apprise the Congress of his sincere desire to terminate the conflict before it went further. Under the circumstances of the Long Island defeat, the Congress could not but listen; at the same time it resisted appearing in the role of supplicant. After some debate it appointed a committee, consisting of Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, to visit the admiral and hear him out. If nothing else, Howe’s acceptance of the credentials of the committee would confer a legitimacy upon the Congress the British government had heretofore refused to give.

Accordingly, Franklin set out from Philadelphia again. The roads and inns were crowded with soldiers and other travelers; this part of the country was not yet at war but obviously expected to be. John Adams, recuperating from an illness, recorded the first night.

At Brunswick, but one bed could be procured for Dr. Franklin and me, in a chamber little larger than the bed, without a chimney and with only one small window. The window was open, and I who was an invalid and afraid of the air in the night, shut it close.

“Oh!” says Franklin. “Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.”

I answered I was afraid of the evening air.

Dr. Franklin replied, “The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now, worse than that without doors. Come! Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.”

Opening the window and leaping into bed, I said I had read his letters to Dr. Cooper in which he had advanced that nobody ever got a cold by going into a cold church, or any other cold air. But the theory was so little consistent with my experience that I thought it a paradox. However I had so much curiosity to hear his reasons that I would run the risque of a cold.

The Doctor then began an harangue, upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together. But I believe they were equally sound and insensible, within a few minutes after me, for the last words I heard were pronounced as if he was more than half asleep.

The next day they arrived at Amboy, opposite Staten Island. Howe sent over a barge with an officer who had instructions to remain there, as a hostage for the return of the commissioners. Franklin and the others declined the offer, taking the officer back with them and thereby placing themselves as hostages to Howe’s honor.