Independence (6 page)

On the stand for four long hours, Franklin sought to redeem himself at home while not burning his bridges in London. The result was testimony shot through with ambiguity and contradiction. He told the House of Commons that the Stamp Act was sowing a whirlwind through the colonies. Having by now read the various assembly resolutions denouncing the Stamp Act, he testified that Americans believed that parliamentary taxation was “unconstitutional, and unjust.” Where once the colonists had seen the British government as the “best in world,” they now had a “very much altered” outlook. Unless the Stamp Act was repealed, the “respect” and “admiration” that Britain had always enjoyed in the colonies would be forfeited and the mother country would henceforth be “detested and rejected.” Franklin might have stopped there. Instead, he advised that Americans could live with indirect taxes, which was precisely what Britain's ministers wanted to hear. Franklin defined an indirect tax as “a duty laid on commodities.… If the people do not like it at that price, they refuse it; they are not obliged to pay it.” The Stamp Act, in contrast, was a tax “forced from the people without their consent.”
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A View of the House of Commons
engraved by B. Cole. Benjamin Franklin testified against the Stamp Act in this chamber in 1766. It was the scene of numerous acrimonious debates on policy toward the colonies, including Edmund Burke's major addresses on America. (Private Collection/ The Stapleton Collection/ The Bridgeman Art Library)

Nine days later Parliament repealed the Stamp Act. Lest the colonists conclude that Parliament was conceding that its authority was limited, it simultaneously passed the Declaratory Act. This measure claimed Parliament's power to legislate for America “in all cases whatsoever.” Parliament had never previously felt the need for such a declaration, but in the wake of the colonists' questions about the constitutionality of the Stamp Act, it believed it had to affirm its sovereignty over the empire.
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A few months later, Parliament, unburdened by doubt and following the lead of a new ministry headed by William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, imposed new taxes on the colonists. It tried what Franklin had recommended. The Townshend Duties, passed in 1767, taxed commodities, including tea, paper, lead, glass, and paint. Parliament had adopted Franklin's preference for indirect levies.

Little time passed before the ministry and Parliament discovered that Franklin had offered bad advice. Americans were opposed to taxes of any sort levied by Parliament. The colonists were unyielding in their belief that Parliament did not possess the constitutional authority to lay taxes on them, no matter what sort of spin was attached to the legislation.

The repeal of the Stamp Act had ended the protests as suddenly as they had begun. Repeal, said John Adams, “has hushed into silence” the insurgents and “composed every Wave of Popular Disorder into a smooth and peaceful Calm.”
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But before the end of 1767 the quiet had been shattered by protests against the Townshend Duties and, at least in the northern port cities, against the British government's attempt to enforce the long-neglected trade laws. For many in those cities, the prospect that the trade laws would be enforced was no less unsettling than parliamentary taxation. Urban merchants had made fortunes through illegal trade and the evasion of custom duties. These businessmen provided employment for countless sailors and dockhands, and the goods they brought into America kept many shopkeepers and craftsmen afloat. Enforcement threatened the livelihood of families in every economic class. As if to be certain that every toe imaginable was stepped on, Parliament accompanied the Townshend Duties and the implementation of the trade laws with a decree that New York's assembly was to be dissolved and not permitted to meet until the colony complied with the Quartering Act. That law, passed a few years earlier, mandated that colonies must help meet the expenses incurred by the British army stationed within their borders. New York had ignored the law and was to be punished for having done so. Only two years after first learning of Britain's new colonial policies, many colonists were alarmed at what seemed to be Parliament's reckless intent to exercise its authority.

The colonial protest gained momentum in 1768. This time the popular leaders took pains to establish greater control over unruly mobs. The wild and frightening urban rampages in 1765 had served their purpose. They had alarmed officials in London, helping to convince them to repeal the Stamp Act. However, many American protest leaders feared that the mayhem had also been counterproductive, chasing away some in the colonies who otherwise might have joined in the protest against the tax. In 1768 crowds once more poured into the streets, venting their anger in noisy, assertive demonstrations. But the protests were largely peaceful. While protestors marched and rallied around Liberty Poles in the major cities, the assemblies in nearly every colony once again remonstrated against parliamentary taxation, beginning with Massachusetts, which in February sent a Circular Letter to the other provincial legislatures. It asked every assembly to appeal to the king to protect the colonists from Parliament's illegal taxation. At the same moment, leaders in several colonies organized boycotts of British imports. Not only were more trade embargoes ginned up than had been the case in 1765, but they were also better planned and less porous, their organizers having learned a thing or two from the shortcomings of the previous boycotts.

The American protest was aided by London's clumsy early response to the colonial resistance. Wills Hill, Lord Hillsborough, the American secretary, ordered the dissolution of every assembly that endorsed Massachusetts's Circular Letter. Hillsborough's maladroit overreaction only fueled the American outcry. Pamphlets attacking British policy rolled off the colonial presses in 1768 in record numbers. The most influential was
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
, written by John Dickinson, in reality a lawyer who lived in Delaware and probably never went near a plow or a pitchfork. Parliament had acted unconstitutionally, Dickinson wrote. It had no authority to levy any sort of tax on Americans—direct or indirect—as the colonists were not, and could never be, represented in a Parliament that met three thousand miles away. Unlike some, however, Dickinson did not suggest that Parliament had no authority over America. Despite the all-too-apparent contradiction in his argument, Dickinson conceded Parliament's power to regulate imperial commerce, something that was “essential … and necessary for the common good of all” those living within the empire.
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Dickinson's more moderate tone appealed to many who longed for accommodation with London.

No one read Dickinson's pamphlet more carefully than Franklin. The two were longtime political enemies, as Dickinson was the leader of the Proprietary Party in Pennsylvania, a faction that had come into being to resist the Franklin-Galloway initiative to royalize the province. Although Franklin did not entirely agree with Dickinson's stance on imperial matters, he thought the conciliatory tone of
Letters from a Farmer
might offer a bridge toward an eventual solution to the Anglo-American quandary. He quietly arranged the publication of Dickinson's tract in London.
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In fact, Franklin acted so covertly that Galloway was unaware of what his longtime political partner had done.

If any Americans yearned for independence in 1768, Franklin was not among them. When Franklin told an acquaintance late that year that he “wish[ed] all prosperity to both” sides, he meant what he said. He still loved and trusted the king and praised him as “the very best in the world.”
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But there was more than that to his thinking. Having spent most of the past decade in England, Franklin desperately hoped for a settlement that would prevent an imperial clash, enabling him to live out his days in London. In Franklin's time, those who escaped the perils of infancy and childhood had a reasonable chance of surviving into their sixties, though few lived much beyond age sixty-five. Franklin turned sixty-two in 1768.

He loved London, a great cosmopolitan center and a city in which, as he said, he had “made many agreeable connections of friendship.”
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London offered convivial clubs and rich enticements for a man with insatiable social and intellectual appetites. The Continent was nearby, too, and Franklin had already traveled there twice, exploring France and Germany. But London had become his home, and it offered him much more than tiny Philadelphia.

It even offered him at least as much female companionship as he had enjoyed at home. At age twenty-four, Franklin had entered into a common-law marriage with Deborah Read of Philadelphia. She had not been his first choice, but when his other courtships failed, Franklin turned to her. Franklin's marriage—like everything that he did—was a cold, calculated move. Deborah was plain and barely literate, but she brought several virtues to the union. She was prudent, frugal, industrious, and helpful around her husband's shop. She was also willing to raise Franklin's illegitimate son, William, born to another woman. Two years into the marriage, Deborah gave birth to a son, Francis, who died of smallpox when he was four years old. (Though he exhorted others to be inoculated, Franklin had mysteriously failed to take the precaution with little Francis.) As Deborah and Benjamin approached their fortieth birthdays, she bore a second child, Sarah, who was called Sally.

Whatever the nature of their relationship may have been in their early years together, Benjamin and Deborah rarely saw one another once they reached middle age. She refused to accompany her husband on his two Atlantic crossings, possibly from fear of sailing, perhaps from an apprehension that she and the great metropolis would not be a good fit, or, more likely, because Franklin led her to believe that his absences would be brief. Between the time of Franklin's voyage to England in 1757 and Deborah's death near the end of 1774, the two were together for only a few months. They did not see each other at all during the last nine years of Deborah's life. She was disconsolate when they were separated. Her husband, who drifted farther and farther apart from his wife until he appears to have lost interest in her altogether, was quite content with the arrangement.

During the roughly sixteen years that Franklin lived in London after 1757, he lodged in a four-room apartment in Margaret Stevenson's spacious four-story home on Craven Street in the center of the city. Mrs. Stevenson, a widow and the same age as Franklin, provided what he called a “genteel” environment, something other than what he was accustomed to with Deborah. The true nature of the relationship between Franklin and Mrs. Stevenson remains a mystery, but she seems to have fulfilled his needs as Deborah no longer could. Contented as he had not been for some time at his own home in Philadelphia, Franklin preferred the company of Margaret Stevenson to that of his wife and daughter.
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While Franklin may have returned to London to facilitate his hopes of becoming the governor of Pennsylvania, his sights might have shifted higher after several years there. By 1768 rumors were swirling that he might be named an undersecretary in the newly created ministerial office of American secretary. The tattle would have caused only sweet sensations for this ambitious man. A subministerial post—the highest public office to which any American could aspire, and which hardly any attained—would be the capstone to Franklin's glorious life. Consequently, the growing imperial strife was a great threat to all of his hopes. If a breach came, Franklin would have to choose between America and England, and he likely already knew that he would choose America. It was his homeland. More important, his property and investments were in America, and they alone could provide security for his last years. But he did not want to have to make the choice between America and the mother country. He wanted to find a solution to the empire's problems so that he might live his final years in London.

Franklin attempted a balancing act. He wished to do nothing that would jeopardize his standing in Pennsylvania or his possible selection to be a subminister. With several irons in the fire, Franklin tried to convince officials in London that the Americans were not as radical as they sometimes appeared to be. He also sought to persuade the Americans to tone down their rhetoric, which he privately labeled “wild ravings.”
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Increasingly, however, Franklin was coming to believe that it would not be easy to resolve the Anglo-American difficulties. Earlier than most, he saw clearly where the imperial clash appeared to be heading. America, he wrote as early as 1767, “must become a great Country, populous and mighty.” It might already be capable of shaking “off any Shackles that may be impos'd on her,” and it might even be sufficiently powerful to “place them on the Imposer.” Abundant “Respect, Veneration and Affection” for Great Britain yet existed in America, Franklin advised, and if Britain ruled wisely and gently, the colonists “might be easily govern'd [by London] for Ages” to come. Franklin also pointed out that over the long haul, Great Britain would need America more than America would need its mother country. But he warned that if the British were so unwise as to attempt to govern the colonists with a heavy hand, it would drive them to “a Separation,” for “the Seeds of Liberty are universally sown” in America and “nothing can eradicate them.” The fate of the empire, he predicted, depended on the prudence of those who held power in London. But even at that early moment Franklin did “not see … a sufficient quantity of the Wisdom” needed to preserve Britain's ties to America.
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