The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (71 page)

Such language, needless to say, did not endear Franklin to the proprietors or their man on the scene. John Penn called the resolves a “dirty piece of scurrility.” A subsequent Franklin pamphlet entitled
Cool Thoughts on the Present Situation
fanned the flames, being anything but cool. The people of Pennsylvania, Franklin said, were in a “wretched situation.” The government was weak and ineffectual. “Mobs assemble and kill (we scarce dare say
murder)
numbers of innocent people in cold blood, who were under the protection of the government.” Proclamations against the violence were issued, but were treated “with the utmost indignity and contempt” by the killers. “They assemble again, and with arms in their hands, approach the capital. The Government truckles, condescends to cajole them, and drops all prosecution of their crimes; whilst honest citizens, threatened in their lives and fortunes, fly the province, as having no confidence in the public protection.”

In making such an argument Franklin elided his own participation in the government he contemned; his entire purpose here was to cast obloquy on the status quo. The objective was nothing less than the destruction of that status quo: the replacement of proprietary government by royal government.

Though Franklin framed his case as one of the people against the proprietors, the situation was considerably more complicated, and as the
annual elections of October 1764 approached, a bitter campaign developed. Franklin continued to assault the proprietors and their governor; the governor and his friends counterattacked with a vengeance. Among other asserted sins, Franklin was charged with desiring the governorship of Pennsylvania for himself, to be bestowed by the king in exchange for Franklin’s help in converting Pennsylvania into a royal colony. Much was made of William Franklin’s bastardy; Franklin was said to have mistreated the mother—the alleged Barbara—allowed her to starve, and dumped her body in an unmarked grave.

Franklin joked of his enemies, “God has blessed me with two or three, to keep me in order.” They certainly tried—and they succeeded, temporarily. During the months before the election Franklin grew even more visible as the symbol of the antiproprietary cause when the Assembly unanimously elected him speaker of the house. Yet the visibility brought liability, for Franklin became the lightning rod (a term just now being used metaphorically) for all manner of complaints against the legislature and its antiproprietary majority.

The voting began at nine o’clock on the morning of October 1. Philadelphia had never witnessed the like. From morning till long past midnight the poll was crowded with voters, who stood in a line that ran far down the street. At three o’clock on the morning of October 2 the proprietary party called for a close, but Franklin and the antiproprietors insisted that the voting continue.

“O! fatal mistake,” declared Charles Pettit, an eyewitness insider, who went on to explain the thinking of Franklin and his allies: “They had a reserve of the aged and lame, which could not come in &c., and some who needed no help: between 3 and 6 o’clock, about 200 voters.” But the proprietary party meanwhile sent messengers to Germantown and other outlying neighborhoods aggrieved against the Assembly. The messengers roused several hundred voters, most of whom backed the proprietors.

This late vote doomed Franklin’s candidacy. Running simultaneously for seats from the city of Philadelphia and Philadelphia County, Franklin lost the former by a small margin, the latter by a whisker—19 votes of nearly 31,000 cast.

16
Stamps and Statesmanship
1764–66

“Mr. Franklin died like a philosopher,” Charles Pettit said. The Stoic himself attributed his defeat to his rivals’ clever mistranslation of an earlier comment by him on Pennsylvania’s Germans, in which he was said to have called them pigs. (He had spoken of the “Boers herding together”; this came out as “herd of boars.”) “They carried (would you think it!) above 1000 Dutch from me,” Franklin told Richard Jackson. Though hardly pleased at losing, Franklin could see the humor in his situation. “This is quite a laughing matter.”

Laughing came easier when the Assembly, in an obvious slap at the Penns, reappointed Franklin agent to England. He should sail back east and petition for an end to proprietary rule. Franklin gladly obliged, and his departure turned into a raucous triumph. Three hundred supporters followed him from his home to the quay at Chester; cannons were fired in his honor and hurrahs shouted. An anthem was sung—“God Save the King,” with lyrics adapted to the occasion, culminating in “Confound their politics/Frustrate such hypocrites/Franklin, on thee we fix/God save us all.”

His reception in London, after a rough but fast winter crossing, was quieter but hardly less devoted. William Strahan greeted him with delight, determined that his friend not escape again. Mrs. Stevenson had held his rooms for him; he resumed residence on Craven Street as though he had never been gone. He surprised Polly Stevenson by writing her from her mother’s own parlor; Polly responded with her usual warmth. Other old friends, he told Deborah, gave him a “most cordial welcome.”

Richard Jackson
had a political reason for being happy to see Franklin. George Grenville had lately proposed a new plan for taxing the American colonies; it involved stamps on various documents and papers. Jackson and some of his fellow agents for the American colonies—including Charles Garth, representing South Carolina—had objected to the stamp tax, but to no avail. Now Jackson enlisted Franklin, as a person recently arrived from America and consequently familiar with the mood there, to approach Grenville directly. Jared Ingersoll of Connecticut, another recent arrival, joined Jackson, Franklin, and Garth. Ingersoll later summarized the meeting.

Mr. Grenville gave us a full hearing—told us he took no pleasure in giving the Americans so much uneasiness as he found he did—that it was the duty of his office to manage the revenue—that he really was made to believe that considering the whole of the circumstances of the Mother Country and the colonies, the latter could and ought to pay something, and that he knew of no better way than that now pursuing to lay such tax, but that if we could tell of a better he would adopt it.

Franklin and the others had reason to doubt Grenville’s candor on this point. The Americans did not love taxes, but they chose to make
their case on the question of
who
would levy the taxes: Parliament or the colonial assemblies? The Americans stood on the right of Englishmen to be taxed only by their own representatives—that is, their assemblies. Grenville and most members of Parliament, without disputing the principle of self-taxation, contended that the writ of Parliament ran to America, that the colonies
were
represented in Parliament, at least as well represented as many of the king’s subjects living in Britain.

When Grenville had first floated the possibility of a stamp tax, Jackson and other agents argued that if revenue needed to be raised, the colonies ought to be allowed to raise it themselves. Grenville voiced vague support for this alternative but failed to provide the information necessary to apportion the tax burden fairly among the several colonies. In the meeting with Franklin and the others, Grenville again said he might listen to a proposal from the colonial assemblies; he asked if the agents “could agree upon the several proportions each colony should raise.” At this late hour, and still lacking critical details, the agents were in no position to answer affirmatively. “We told him no,” Ingersoll recorded—which, by most evidence, was what Grenville wanted to hear.

Yet Franklin would not leave the matter at that. Instead he proposed an alternative to Grenville’s stamp scheme. Franklin’s plan would raise the revenue Grenville needed; it would also solve a perennial problem for the colonies—and for that reason be far more palatable than a batch of new taxes. As part of Grenville’s program for reorganizing imperial finances, Parliament recently had forbidden the colonies to issue paper currency. Presumably the ban was temporary, but in the meantime the colonial economies, already suffering from a postwar depression, might strangle.

Franklin proposed that Parliament authorize the issue of paper currency at interest. In effect this would be a stamp tax on paper money, but Franklin thought it would go down far better than a stamp tax on the sorts of items Grenville envisioned: licenses, deeds, indentures, leases, newspapers, almanacs, playing cards, dice. Grenville’s list hit people unused to paying for those items, people often without much money. The appeal of Franklin’s plan was that the people likely to avail themselves of the paper money—merchants, most obviously—were used to paying for money (in the form of interest) and had the wherewithal to do so. As Franklin explained his scheme, “It will operate as a general tax on the colonies, and yet not an unpleasing one, as he who actually pays the interest has an equivalent or more in the use of the principal.” He added, “The rich, who handle most money, would in reality pay most of the tax.”

It was an intriguing idea. It might have worked. If it had, it would
have saved both Britain and America a great deal of trouble and ill will. Whether it would have materially altered the course of the next two decades is impossible to know.

But Grenville—“besotted with his stamp scheme,” according to Franklin—refused to entertain it. Nor was Parliament interested. To some degree the very unpalatableness of the stamps in America became an argument for approving them. Charles Townshend, whom the Americans would learn to loathe, defended the principle of Parliamentary taxation of the colonies: “Will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence until they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

A lonely few in Westminster challenged this version of imperial history. Isaac Barré, a veteran of the French and Indian War, rebuffed Townshend:

They planted by
your
care? No! Your oppressions planted them in America…. They nourished by
your
indulgence? They grew by your neglect of them…. They protected by
your
arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defence of a country whose frontier, while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument.

Barré’s words drew cheers in America but moved Grenville not at all. The prime minister pushed the stamp bill through the necessary three readings; on February 27, 1765, it passed the House of Commons; on March 22 it received the royal assent.

Franklin
had done as much as any reasonable man in his position could to prevent Grenville’s bill from becoming law; once it became law he did what any reasonable man in his position would have done to make the best of an unsatisfactory situation.