The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2 page)

Alexander Wedderburn was going to tell them. The solicitor general possessed great rhetorical gifts and greater ambition. The former had made him the most feared advocate in the realm; the latter lifted him to his present post when he abandoned his allies in the opposition and embraced the ministry of Lord North. Wedderburn was known to consider the Boston tea riot treason, and if the law courts upheld his interpretation, those behind the riot would be liable to the most severe sanctions, potentially including death. Wedderburn was expected to argue that the man in the Cockpit today was the prime mover behind the outburst in Boston. The crowd quivered with anticipation.

They all knew the man in the pit; indeed, the whole world knew Benjamin Franklin. His work as political agent for several of the American colonies had earned him recognition around London, but his fame far transcended that. He was, quite simply, one of the most illustrious scientists and thinkers on earth. His experiments with electricity, culminating in his capture of lightning from the heavens, had won him universal praise as the modern Prometheus. His mapping of the Gulf Stream saved the time and lives of countless sailors. His ingenious fireplace conserved fuel and warmed homes on both sides of the Atlantic. His contributions to economics, meteorology, music, and psychology expanded the
reach of human knowledge and the grip of human power. For his accomplishments the British Royal Society had awarded him its highest prize; foreign societies had done the same. Universities queued to grant him degrees. The ablest minds of the age consulted him on matters large and small. Kings and emperors summoned him to court, where they admired his brilliance and basked in its reflected glory.

Genius is prone to producing envy. Yet it was part of Franklin’s genius that he had produced far less than his share, due to an unusual ability to disarm those disposed to envy. In youth he discovered that he was quicker of mind and more facile of pen than almost everyone he met; he also discovered that a boy of humble birth, no matter how gifted, would block his own way by letting on that he knew how smart he was. He learned to deflect credit for some of his most important innovations. He avoided arguments wherever possible; when important public issues hinged on others’ being convinced of their errors, he often argued anonymously, adopting assumed names, or Socratically, employing the gentle questioning of the Greek master. He became almost as famous for his sense of humor as for his science; laughing, his opponents listened and were persuaded.

Franklin’s self-effacing style succeeded remarkably; at sixty-eight he had almost no personal enemies and comparatively few political enemies for a man of public affairs. But those few included powerful figures. George Grenville, the prime minister responsible for the Stamp Act, the tax bill that triggered all the American troubles, never forgave him for single-handedly demolishing the rationale for the act in a memorable session before the House of Commons. Grenville and his allies lay in wait to exact their revenge on Franklin. Yet he never made a false step.

Until now. A mysterious person had delivered into his hands confidential letters from Governor Hutchinson and other royal officials in Massachusetts addressed to an undersecretary of state in London. These letters cast grave doubt on the bona fides of Hutchinson, for years the bête noire of the Massachusetts assembly. As Massachusetts’s agent, Franklin had forwarded the letters to friends in Boston. Hutchinson’s enemies there got hold of the letters and published them.

The publication provoked an instant uproar. In America the letters were interpreted as part of a British plot to enslave the colonies; the letters fueled the anger that inspired the violence that produced the Boston tea riot. In England the letters provoked charges and countercharges as to who could have been so dishonorable as to steal and publish private correspondence. A duel at swords left one party wounded and both
parties aching for further satisfaction; only at this point—to prevent more bloodshed—did Franklin reveal his role in transmitting the letters.

His foes seized the chance to destroy him. Since that session in Commons eight years before, he had become the symbol and spokesman in London of American resistance to the sovereignty of Parliament; on his head would be visited all the wrath and resentment that had been building in that proud institution from the time of the Stamp Act to the tea riot. Alexander Wedderburn sharpened his tongue and moved in for the kill.

None present at the Cockpit on January 29, 1774, could afterward recall the like of the hearing that day. The solicitor general outdid himself. For an hour he hurled invective at Franklin, branding him a liar, a thief, the instigator of the insurrection in Massachusetts, an outcast from the company of all honest men, an ingrate whose attack on Hutchinson betrayed nothing less than a desire to seize the governor’s office for himself. So slanderous was Wedderburn’s diatribe that no London paper would print it. But the audience reveled in it, hooting and applauding each sally, each bilious bon mot. Not even the lords of the Privy Council attempted to disguise their delight at Wedderburn’s astonishing attack. Almost to a man and a woman, the spectators that day concluded that Franklin’s reputation would never recover. Ignominy, if not prison or worse, was his future now.

Franklin stood silent throughout his ordeal. Even at his advanced age he was a large man, taller than most people would have guessed. His shoulders had lost some of their youthful breadth, for it had been decades since he hoisted the heavy sets of lead type that were the printer’s daily burden, and longer since he had swum for exercise; but still they conveyed an impression of strength. His stoutness had increased with the years; cloaked today in a brown, knee-length coat of Manchester velvet, it connoted gravity. He eschewed the wigs that decorated nearly every head present, male and female; his thin gray hair fell over and behind his ears to his shoulders. His face had never been expressive; today it was a mask. Not the slightest frown or grimace greeted the diatribes rained down upon him. When instructed to submit to questions, he silently refused—a refusal that seemed to seal his humiliation.

But he was not humiliated; he was outraged. The mask concealed not mortification but anger. Who did these people—this bought solicitor,
these smug lords, the corrupt ministers that made the proceeding possible—who did they think they were? Who did they think
he
was?

It was the question of the hour; generalized, it was the question on which hung the fate of the British empire. Who were these Americans? To the British they were Britons, albeit of a turbulent sort. The Americans might live across the ocean, but the colonies they inhabited had been planted by Britain and were defended by Britain; therefore to the government of Britain—preeminently, to the British Parliament—the Americans must submit, like any other Britons. To the Americans, the question was more complicated. Nearly all Americans considered themselves Britons, but Britons of a different kind than lived in London or the Midlands or Scotland. Possessing their own assemblies—their own parliaments—the Americans believed they answered to the British Crown but not to the British Parliament. At its core the struggle between the American colonies and the British government was a contest between these competing definitions of American identity. Put simply, were the Americans truly Britons, or were they something else?

Franklin came to the questioning with decades of experience. For his whole life he had been asking himself who—or what—he was. As a boy he had been a Bostonian. Yet the theocratic orthodoxy of Boston’s Puritans eventually became more than he could stand, and, linked to the legal and familial orthodoxy of an apprenticeship to an overbearing elder brother, it drove him away. He broke his apprenticeship, defied law and family, and fled Boston.

He landed in Philadelphia, a comparative haven for freethinkers like himself. During the next forty years he earned an honorable name and substantial wealth as the publisher of the
Pennsylvania Gazette,
the author of
Poor Richard’s Almanack,
and the originator of numerous public improvements in his adopted home. By all evidence he was the model Philadelphian.

Yet gradually Philadelphia, like Boston before it, began to chafe. The political framework that had suited Pennsylvania at its founding—the charter granted by Charles II to William Penn and his heirs—hindered the growth of the province at maturity. For his first two decades in Philadelphia, Franklin scarcely noticed politics; but the wars that accompanied colonial life during the eighteenth century enforced attention. And they drove home the anachronistic nature of rule by a single family. Initially he battled the Penns from Philadelphia; when that failed, he carried the fight to England as the agent of the Pennsylvania assembly.

Yet there was more than politics in his departure. Like Boston before
it, Philadelphia had become too small for him. The budding genius of his Boston youth had blossomed in the tolerant atmosphere of Philadelphia; but Philadelphia, and finally even all of America, afforded insufficient scope for the talents he discovered in himself and the world discovered in him. Kindred scientific spirits were few in America; kindred intellectual gifts still fewer.

Britain at first seemed everything Franklin desired. Electricians and others who had admired him from afar found him even more admirable in person. His admirers became his friends; his friends became his sponsors, introducing him to influential figures throughout the country. His journeys across England and Scotland turned into triumphal processions. The best houses opened their doors to him; cities and towns made him an honorary citizen. The Royal Society embraced him and provided a venue through which he communicated with the most learned and ingenious men of Britain and Europe—the Scotsman Hume, the Irishman Burke, the German Kant, the Italian Beccaria, the Frenchman Condorcet. London was soon his spiritual home. It would have been his actual and permanent home if he had succeeded in persuading his wife, Deborah, to leave Philadelphia. As it was, despite her refusal, he took up semipermanent residence in London, in Craven Street.

Franklin proudly called himself a Briton. In doing so he did not deny his American birth, for he conceived Americans to be as fully Britons as the English, Scots, and Welsh. He delineated for all who would listen the glorious future of Britain in North America, a future joining American energy to the English tradition of self-government. As a measure of his faith in the future of America within the British empire, he employed his influence to help his son William win appointment as royal governor of New Jersey.

But then things began to go wrong. A foolish ministry ignored that tradition of self-government and started treating the Americans as subjects—not subjects simply of King George but of Parliament. The Stamp Act attempted to put this novel interpretation into effect and touched off the first round of rioting in America. Franklin sought to calm the turmoil by persuading Parliament of its error; this was the purpose of his appearance before Commons in 1766. Yet though the Grenvillites were compelled to retreat at that time, the lesson never took hold, and distrust between the colonies and the mother country grew.

All the same, for several years civil discussions of the differences between the American and British views of the English constitution remained possible. Franklin, the most civil of men, did his best to promote
these discussions, at peril to his political reputation in America, where the radicals spoke of him as residing in the pocket of the British ministry.

And what had his efforts accomplished? The answer came in the Cockpit: nothing but abuse and condemnation from an arrogant people maliciously led. Wedderburn and the ministry ignored the crucial issues between Britain and America, the high constitutional questions that would hold the empire together or tear it apart, in order to indulge personal vanity and satisfy corrupt ambition. At this moment of truth, all the British government could do was vilify the character of one who had been Britain’s most loyal subject, its best friend among the Americans. Franklin had thought Britain could be his home; now he realized his only home was America. In the Cockpit it was Wedderburn insulting Franklin, but it was also Britain mocking America.

Franklin left the Cockpit seething—yet enlightened. Wedderburn had answered the question that Franklin had been asking all his life, and that his fellow Americans had been asking of late. Who were they? They must be Americans, for they could not be Britons.

Revolutions are not made in a morning, nor empires lost in a day. But Britain did itself more damage in those two hours than anyone present imagined. By alienating Franklin, the British government showed itself doubly inept: for making an enemy of a friend, and for doing so of the ablest and most respected American alive. At a moment when independence was hardly dreamed of in America, Franklin understood that to independence America must come.