The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (87 page)

Franklin’s next respite was more restful but also more productive. Jonathan Shipley was an Anglican bishop of the absentee sort: his see was in Wales, but he spent nearly all his time in London or at his country home at Twyford. He was a great admirer of Franklin and invited the American to visit Twyford. Franklin accepted with pleasure—the more so for the company of Mrs. Shipley and the couple’s five daughters. Perhaps their mere presence, or their inquiries about what life was like when
he
was a child, recalled to mind his early years; in any event it was at Twyford that summer that he began writing his memoirs. Although taking the form of a (very long) letter to William, it was obviously intended for publication, for Franklin wrote on large folio sheets, leaving one vertical half of each page blank for subsequent interpolations (which in fact he later provided). By subsequent tradition, he wrote during the day, then read his draftwork to the Shipley family in the evening.

He charmed them all, and they him. Kitty, the youngest, rode with him back to London, where she attended school. On the way they discussed suitable husbands for her sisters (a country squire for one, a merchant for another, a duke and an earl for the third and fourth). For Kitty herself? he asked. An old general, she said. “Hadn’t you better take him while he’s a young officer, and let him grow old upon your hands?” asked Franklin (as he related the conversation to Kitty’s mother). “No, that won’t do,” she replied. “He must be an old man of 70 or 80, and take me when I am about 30. And then you know I may be a rich young widow.”

For a final
fling that summer of 1771, Franklin joined Richard Jackson for a tour of Ireland and Scotland. The condition of Ireland, which also stood in a colonial position to Britain, had long intrigued Franklin, and his interest only grew with the constitutional controversy
between Britain and America. In theory Ireland provided an alternative model for American relations with Britain. Franklin, the essential empiricist, wished to measure theory against practice. He devised a set of questions to direct his observations. “Can the farmers find a ready market and a good living price for the produce of their lands? Or do they raise less than they might do, if the demand was greater and the price better? … Is Ireland much in debt to England or any foreign country for goods or merchandise consumed in it? … Is Ireland in general in a state of progressive improvement, or the contrary?”

The answers shocked him. “Ireland itself is a fine country,” he noted to Thomas Cushing, speaking of the land and climate; “and Dublin a magnificent city.” But that was as far as his compliments went. “The appearances of general extreme poverty among the lower people are amazing. They live in wretched hovels of mud and straw, are clothed in rags, and subsist chiefly on potatoes. Our New England farmers of the poorest sort, in regard to the enjoyment of all the comforts of life, are princes when compared to them.”

Why was this so? Not, apparently, because of some deficiency in the people (as the English liked to say); rather the arrangements of society prevented the improvement of the Irish people.

Such is the effect of the discouragements of industry, the non-residence not only of pensioners but of many original landlords who lease their lands in gross to undertakers that rack the tenants, and fleece them skin and all, to make estates to themselves, while the first rents, as well as most of the pensions, are spent out of the country.

An English gentleman there said to me, that by what he had heard of the good grazing in North America, and by what he saw of the plenty of flaxseed imported in Ireland from thence, he could not understand why we did not rival Ireland in the beef and butter trade to the West Indies, and share with it in its linen trade. But he was satisfied when I told him, that I supposed the reason might be,
Our people eat beef and butter every day, and wear shirts themselves.

Conditions among the common people of Scotland were hardly better. Franklin and Jackson crossed over from Ireland during a lull between two hurricanes; the human devastation they saw in Scotland made hurricanes appear almost benign by contrast. And together with what Franklin
had lately observed of the manufacturing regions of England, it confirmed his conviction of the superiority of the American mode of social organization.

I thought often of the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the manufactory perhaps of his own family. Long may they continue in this situation!

But if they should ever envy the
trade
of these countries, I can put them in a way to obtain a share of it. Let them with three-fourths of the people of Ireland live the year round on potatoes and butter milk, without shirts, then may their merchants export beef, butter and linen. Let them with the generality of the common people of Scotland go barefoot, then may they make large exports in shoes and stockings. And if they will be content to wear rags like the spinners and weavers of England, they may make cloths and stuffs for all parts of the world.

Farther, if my countrymen should ever wish for the honour of having among them a gentry enormously wealthy, let them sell their farms and pay racked rents; the scale of the landlords will rise as that of the tenants is depressed, who will soon become poor, tattered, dirty, and abject in spirit.

Had I never been in the American colonies, but was to form my judgment of civil society by what I have lately seen, I should never advise a nation of savages to admit of civilisation. For I assure you, that in the possession and enjoyment of the various comforts of life, compared to these people every Indian is a gentleman; and the effect of this kind of civil society seems only to be the depressing multitudes below the savage state that a few may be raised above it.

If Franklin’s observation of common life reinforced his patriotic feelings about America, so did his conversations with the better-off sort. The Irish parliament made a habit of allowing visiting members of the English parliament to sit among the Irish members; they accorded a similar privilege to Franklin as a distinguished representative of the American assemblies, reasoning that the American assemblies
were
English parliaments. “I esteemed it a mark of respect for our country,” he wrote Thomas Cushing. Franklin compared experiences with Irishmen who
chafed under British rule as he and his American friends did. “They are all on the American side,” he informed Joseph Galloway.

In Edinburgh he stayed with David Hume, “in an elegant house in the new part of the city,” according to a visitor from Rhode Island, Henry Marchant. Franklin was in usual fine form. “We had a good dish of tete-a-tete,” Marchant remarked. “The Doctor was pleased to open very freely and to enter minutely into many matters—interesting as well as entertaining.” Hume could be prickly, as Franklin would discover, but on this visit host and guest enjoyed each other’s company. “The good wishes of all your Brother Philosophers in this place attend you heartily and sincerely,” Hume wrote Franklin afterward.

The encounter with Hume was a pleasure; another encounter was a puzzle. In Dublin, Franklin and Jackson chanced to meet Lord Hillsborough. Franklin expected a snub or worse from his foe, but received quite the opposite. “He was extremely civil,” Franklin related to William, “wonderfully so to me whom he had not long before abused to Mr. Strahan as a factious turbulent fellow, always in mischief, a republican, enemy to the king’s service, and what not.” Hillsborough engaged Franklin and Jackson in frank conversation and insisted they visit him at Hillsborough (the lord’s home).

“In my own mind I was determined not to go that way,” Franklin said. But the vagaries of travel made the town unavoidable, and so the man.

As soon as his Lordship knew we were arrived at the inn he sent a message over for us to come to his house. There we were detained by 1000 civilities from Tuesday to Sunday. He seemed extremely solicitous to give me and America through me a good opinion of him. In our first conversations he expressed himself as a good Irishman, censuring the English government for its narrowness with regard to Ireland, in restraining its commerce, manufactures, &c., and when I applied his observations to America, he agreed immediately that it was wrong to restrain our manufactures, that the subjects in every part of the King’s dominions had a natural right to make the best use they could of the production of their country….

His attentions to me in every circumstance of accommodation and entertainment were very particular, putting his own cloak about my shoulders when I went out, that I might not take cold, placing his eldest son, Lord Kilwarling, in his phaeton with me, to drive me 40 miles round the country, to see the manufactures, seats, &c., and when we took leave, requesting that I would let him see me often in London, &c., &c.

Franklin wondered at Hillsborough’s hospitality and apparent change of heart, clear back to London. “Does not all this seem extraordinary to you?” he wrote William from Craven Street.

20
To Kick a Little
1772–73

By the early 1770s Franklin was by far the most famous American in the world, and arguably the most illustrious subject of George III. His electrical papers, first published in London in 1751 as
Experiments and Observations on Electricity,
were now in their fourth edition; translations circulated across the European continent. The Marquis de Condorcet, one of France’s leading mathematical and literary lights, wrote to
“mon cher et illustre confrère
” to strike up a correspondence that lasted for years. Giambattista Beccaria of Turin, by now a regular

correspondent, declared, “To you it is given to enlighten human minds with the true principles of the electric science, to reassure them by your conductors against the terrors of thunder, and”—referring to Franklin’s armonica—“to sweeten their senses with a most touching and suave music.” The German philosopher Immanuel Kant dubbed Franklin the “modern Prometheus.”

In 1772 Franklin was notified of his election as an
associé étranger
of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, one of only eight foreigners so honored. He was speaking no less accurately than politely when he answered, “A place among your foreign members is justly esteemed by all Europe the greatest honour a man can arrive at in the Republic of Letters.”

The following year his fame widened further. A Paris physician named Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, himself something of a scientific celebrity, with membership in royal academies and societies across Europe, had for some time been translating Franklin’s papers into French. In 1773 these appeared as the
Oeuvres de M. Franklin
in two volumes. Dubourg was delighted to report to the author that the edition was being received
“avec une sorte de passion favorable.
”

“Learned and ingenious foreigners that come to England almost all make a point of visiting me,” Franklin matter-of-factly wrote William in the summer of 1772. “Several of the foreign ambassadors have assiduously cultivated my acquaintance…. The King too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard.”

Franklin
continued to give his admirers cause for admiration. The most superficial knowledge of chemistry and electricity revealed that gunpowder and lightning made bad companions; in 1769 an enormous explosion in Italy followed a lightning strike upon a powder magazine at Brescia, in which a thousand persons perished and much of the town was leveled. The disaster made the London papers and alerted the keepers of the Crown’s munitions to the potential for similar peril at home. Fortunately, they noted, the world’s leading expert on lightning resided in Craven Street; ignoring the questions that surrounded Franklin’s politics, they invited him to join a commission devoted to diminishing—eliminating, if possible—the danger from aerial electricity to the large new magazine at Purfleet on the Thames. The appointment involved Franklin in an ongoing debate regarding the optimal shape for lightning
rods—pointed (Franklin’s view) or blunt. Franklin’s arguments won in the end, and by the autumn of 1773 the king’s gunpowder nestled quietly beneath pointed rods—from where, but two years hence, it was loaded onto ships hostilely bound for America.