Book of Ages (28 page)

Sometime that fall, in London, a member of Parliament, probably
Thomas Pownall, a former governor of Massachusetts, showed Franklin—in confidence—a series of letters written to and from Thomas Hutchinson and other officials between 1768 and 1771. Read very selectively and, frankly, unfairly, Hutchinson’s letters find him suggesting that the colonists enjoyed too much
liberty. Pownall showed Franklin the correspondence in order to prove to him that the colonists ought not to blame Parliament for having sent an army to Boston but should instead blame Hutchinson. Franklin would not let those letters alone.

On December 2, 1772, Franklin made a fateful decision. He sent the letters to Thomas Cushing, writing to him:

Franklin offered more caveats about how the letters were to be handled:

The letters reached Boston at the end of March 1773.
¹⁸

They arrived along with rumors of a new
tax. In 1770, Parliament had repealed the Townshend Acts—all but the tax on
tea. That year, three hundred wealthy Boston women had signed a pledge to stop drinking tea.
¹⁹
But in the spring of 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act to bail out the
East India Company, which, with a surplus of tea and stiff competition from smugglers, was facing bankruptcy. By eliminating duties on tea in England and lowering the import tax to just three pence, the Tea Act actually reduced the price of tea in the colonies, but it offended by its assertion of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies, and by its protection of a politically connected corporate monopoly. It wasn’t the price; it was the principle.

Franklin counseled patience, writing, in a letter to Cushing on March 9, “I must hope that great Care will be taken to keep our People quiet, since nothing is more wish’d for by our Enemies, than that by Insurrections we should give a good Pretence for increasing the Military among us, and putting us under more severe Restraints.”
²⁰
But he knew that the letters he was sending would only fan flames.

Hunched over his desk, Franklin wrote, that same day, a letter to his sister. A printer named Samuel Hall who had married a daughter of
James Franklin’s owed Benjamin Franklin more than £100. Franklin, who rarely pursued
debtors, had engaged
John Adams to recover the debt. Adams had been successful, and Franklin, having received the payment in February, had ordered that it be given to Jane.
²¹
It was the most money she had ever had at once. She used it to make another go at running a
millinery shop out of her house. Her brother sent her another trunk full of materials.
²²
And he gave her advice: “If you possibly can, try to increase your Capital, by adding the Profits.”
²³

Once word of the Tea Act reached Boston, Cushing abandoned Franklin’s stipulations about keeping the Hutchinson letters private. On June 2,
Samuel Adams read the letters aloud in the General Assembly. And then, on June 15, Benjamin Edes printed them in the
Boston Gazette
.
²⁴
Calls came for Hutchinson’s impeachment.

Jane sent her brother six letters in 1773; not one survives.
²⁵
Franklin
may well have destroyed them. His correspondence that year was especially dangerous. If his sister was more candid than she ought to have been, in describing events in Boston—and especially if she mentioned the Hutchinson affair, about which she might have known more than he wished—those letters, in the wrong hands, would have been damaging. In the letters Franklin exchanged with Jonathan Williams Sr. during those months, they spoke of the Boston poet
Phillis Wheatley, a slave, who had traveled to London. Williams recommended that Franklin meet her. (“Upon your Recommendation I went to see the black Poetess and offer’d her any Services I could do her,” Franklin wrote Williams.)
²⁶
Whether Jane ever met Phillis Wheatley, or ever wrote to her brother about her, is unknown, since her letters from this year are all
lost. What she wrote can only be deduced from his replies.

She urged him to make peace.

“I thank you for your good Wishes that I may be a means of restoring Harmony between the two Countries,” he returned. “It would make me very happy to see it, whoever was the Instrument.” He sent her his satire, “Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One,” in which, echoing their grandfather Folger, he said, “I have held up a Looking-Glass in which some Ministers may see their ugly Faces, & the Nation its Injustice.” Parliament was bullying the colonies, and the only way to deal with bullying was to hold your ground. “I grew tir’d of Meekness when I saw it without Effect,” he wrote.
²⁷
He gave her this piece of advice: “
If you make yourself a Sheep, the Wolves will eat you
.”
²⁸

In October, a ship carrying Jane’s
millinery supplies arrived from London. Jonathan Williams Sr., writing to Franklin to acknowledge the arrival of the goods, informed him that, under the circumstances, Jane, wisely, had decided to buy nothing else from London.
²⁹
In November and December, three more
ships, the
Beaver,
the
Eleanor,
and the
Dartmouth,
arrived from England, carrying
tea (a fourth ship ran aground off Cape Cod). By law, they had twenty days to unload their cargo. The
Dartmouth
’s twenty days were set to expire at midnight on December 16. At ten o’clock that morning, seven thousand people showed up at the Old South Meeting House to decide what to do. A courier was sent to Hutchinson, asking him to let the ships return to England without unloading the tea. Hutchinson refused. Three groups of men, about fifty altogether, then headed to three meeting places, the Green Dragon, Edes’s print shop, and a carpenter’s house,
where they disguised themselves as Mohawks, smearing their faces with soot. Then they marched to Griffin’s Wharf, boarded the three ships, and dumped into the sea more than three hundred chests of tea.
³⁰

For the trouble in which he found himself, Hutchinson blamed Franklin. Hutchinson had surreptitiously obtained a copy of a letter Franklin had written to Cushing in July. In it, Franklin had urged the colonial assemblies “to engage firmly with each other that they will never grant aids to the Crown in any General War till those Rights are recogniz’d by the King and both Houses of Parliament; communicating at the same time to the Crown this their Resolution. Such a Step I imagine will bring the Dispute to a Crisis; and whether our Demands are immediately comply’d with, or compulsory Means are thought of to make us Rescind them, our Ends will finally be obtain’d.”
³¹
This letter was more damning than any piece of Hutchinson correspondence that Franklin had sent to Cushing.

Hutchinson sent Franklin’s letter to
Lord Dartmouth, the colonial secretary, who judged it an act of
treason. Dartmouth ordered
Thomas Gage, commander of the
British Army in America, who was stationed in Boston, to obtain the original, which Gage was unable to do (Cushing had likely burned it). On December 25, only after speculation about who had sent Hutchinson’s letters to Boston had led to a duel, Franklin finally admitted that it was he. In January 1774, word of the dumping of the tea reached England. Franklin was denounced before the
Privy Council as a thief, a villain, and a traitor. He was dismissed from his royally appointed position as deputy
postmaster general of North America. He was upbraided, and disgraced.

“You will hear before this comes to hand, that I am depriv’d of my Office,” he wrote his sister. “Don’t let this give you any Uneasiness. You and I have almost finished the Journey of Life; we are now but a little way from home, and have enough in our Pockets to pay the Post Chaises.”
³²

Remaining in London in his capacity as agent of four colonial assemblies, Franklin lobbied against a series of measures proposed in response to the dumping of the tea—to no avail. By March, Parliament had passed the first of what the colonists called the
Intolerable Acts. The Boston Port Act closed the
port of the city of Boston. The Massachusetts Government Act greatly constrained the activities of
town meetings.

Hutchinson sailed for England in May, never to return.
³³
He had become a liability to the Crown. Gage was appointed in his place. The
port of Boston was closed on June 1; the only
ships to arrive in Boston were those carrying still more
British soldiers.

Jane wrote to her brother, frantic about rumors that he had abandoned the colonial cause, to which she had herself become more and more persuaded and devoted. He sent reassurance. “The Report you mention that I offer’d to desert my Constituents, and banish myself if I might continue in Place, is an infamous Falshood, as you supposed.” He had not traded his integrity for a post. “For God knows my Heart, I would not accept the best Office the King has to bestow, while such Tyrannic Measures are taking against my Country.” And then he closed: “All this to yourself. To the World such Declarations might seem incredible, and a meer puffing of ones own Character: therefore, my dear Sister, show this to no body: I write it meerly for your Satisfaction; and that you may not be disturb’d by such Idle Reports.”
³⁴

Franklin was very often disingenuous. But he does seem to have been genuinely concerned that his sister thought ill of him. He had been lashed by the
Privy Council. He had been assaulted in the press, called a traitor on two continents. When he didn’t hear from her, he wrote her again: “I wish to know how you fare in the present Distress of our dear Country. I am apprehensive that the Letters between us, tho’ very innocent ones, are intercepted. They might restore me yours at least, after reading them; especially as I never complain of broken patch’d-up Seals, (of late very common) because I know not whom to fix the Fact on.” He wanted to be sure she knew that what was being reported in
newspapers about his having accepted a
political appointment was false. “I am anxious to preserve your good Opinion, and as I know your Sentiments, and that you must be much afflicted your self, and even despise me, if you thought me capable of accepting any Office from this Government while it is acting with so much Hostility towards my native Country, I cannot miss this first Opportunity of assuring you that there is not the least Foundation for such Report.”
³⁵

She had not lost her faith in him. But life in Boston was dreadful, she wrote him, “the towns being so full of Proflegate soulders and many such officers there is hardly four and twenty hours Pases without some fray amongst them.” Her daughter Jenny had married
Peter Collas, without her mother’s consent; luckily, they had moved to the countryside.
³⁶
“She has not curidge to stay in town,” Jane wrote. The
Quartering Act meant
that soldiers could occupy any house or shop they liked. Drunken soldiers went on rampages. People began stockpiling
weapons in the countryside. In September, after Gage seized ammunition stored in Charlestown and Cambridge, the legislature established the
Committee of Safety; in October, it created special units of “
minutemen,” who could be ready to fight at a moment’s notice.

In November, Jane put on her spectacles and wrote a letter to her brother about the British soldiers in the city.

“Damn your eyes!” a bloody soldier cried, with bayonet drawn, as he attacked a shopkeeper just across the street from Jane’s house. “I will kill every inhabitant I meet!” Jane wrote Franklin that she sought consolation where she had always sought it: “My only comfort is
God Reigns.”
³⁷

The pace of the crisis quickened. In August 1774, John and
Samuel Adams set off, by carriage, for Philadelphia, for the first meeting of the
Continental Congress. “The distinction between
Virginians,
Pennsylvanians,
New Yorkers, and
New Englanders, are no more,”
Patrick Henry declared in Philadelphia. “I am not a Virginian, but an American.”
³⁸
Jane had her own ideas about what was going on. “The Uniteing of the
Colonies”
she considered nothing less than “a token of Gods Design to deliver us out of all our trobles.”
³⁹