The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (59 page)

Some warned that without the French threat from Canada, the North Americans would become dangerously independent-minded. Franklin did not deny that Americans thought on their own. Such was no more than their heritage as Englishmen. But he dismissed any notion that they might become dangerous to Britain. Indeed, it was the colonies’ very independent-mindedness that would prevent danger to London; the danger was entirely to themselves. “Their jealousy of each other is so great that however necessary an union of the colonies has long been, for their common defence and security against their enemies, and how sensible soever each colony has been of that necessity, yet they have never been able to effect such an union among themselves, nor even to agree in requesting the mother country to establish it for them.” If the American colonies could not combine against a universally acknowledged foe, still less could they combine against their mother country. “An union amongst them for such a purpose is not merely improbable, it is impossible.”

Though this last part of Franklin’s argument was certainly convenient in the present context, there is no reason to doubt his sincerity in making it. As the author of the most promising unrealized plan of union, he understood full well the difficulty of creating a united colonial front. Yet he did not despair entirely, nor was he above suggesting a circumstance that lent an edge to his argument, if only indirectly.

When I say such an union is impossible, I mean without the most grievous tyranny and oppression. People who have property in a country which they may lose, and privileges which they may endanger, are generally disposed to be quiet, and even to bear much, rather than hazard all. While the government is mild and just, while important civil and religious rights are secure, such subjects will be dutiful and obedient. The waves do not rise, but when the winds blow.

Franklin
did not anticipate rising waves; still less did he hope for them. The
annus mirabilis
of British arms—the period from the recapture of Louisbourg through the conquest of Quebec—was also the season of Franklin’s most intense attachment to the British empire. He took pride in Britain’s prowess and pleasure at the thought that America was extending British influence across the New World.

A personal experience during the summer of 1758 reinforced his attachment to Britain. Following his second visit to Cambridge, he and William toured Northamptonshire, the Franklins’ ancestral homeland. From his father and Uncle Benjamin, Franklin knew a little of his roots, but in his childhood and youth, when he heard their stories, where he was from meant far less to him than where he was going. A boy who abandoned the city of his birth could hardly be bothered with the village where his father was born. Yet as the road behind him grew longer, and the road before him presumably shorter, he paid more heed to his family’s origins. That he was traveling in company with his own son simply augmented his desire to learn about the land and people from which both sprang.

They visited the village of Ecton, where his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and generations of Franklins before them had lived. The rector of the parish showed them the church register, which recorded Franklin births, marriages, and deaths for two centuries—as far back as the book went. They met his cousin Mary Fisher, the daughter of Thomas Franklin, Josiah’s eldest brother. “She seems to have been a very smart, sensible woman,” though now “weak with age,” Franklin told Deborah.

But it was Thomas Franklin whose story particularly struck his nephew. At the village church Franklin and William met the wife of the rector, who showed them around the churchyard and ordered a pail of water and a stiff brush, which Franklin’s slave Peter used to scour the moss from the family headstones. While William copied the inscriptions on the stones, she acted as local historian.

She entertained and diverted us highly with stories of Thomas Franklin, Mrs. Fisher’s father, who was a conveyancer, something of a lawyer, clerk of the county courts, and clerk to the archdeacon in his visitations; a very leading man in all county affairs, and much employed in public business. He set on foot a subscription for erecting chimes in their steeple, and completed it, and we heard them play. He found out an easy method of saving their village meadows from being drowned, as they used to be sometimes by the river, which method is still in being; but when first proposed, nobody could conceive how it could be; but however they said if Franklin says he knows how to do it, it will be done. His advice and opinion was sought for on all occasions, by all sorts of people, and he was looked upon, she said, by some, as something of a conjurer.

One envisions Franklin listening to this description, and with each new detail identifying more fully with his uncle. Part of Franklin’s problems with his father had followed from the simple fact that he was more gifted and ambitious than Josiah; on many occasions he must have wondered—not literally, but emotionally—whether he was really his father’s son. Now it all fell into place: whether or not his father’s son, he was his uncle’s nephew. The rootless boy who had abandoned Boston had grown fond of Philadelphia, but this was different. The roots here ran far deeper, providing a sense of familial continuity that spanned centuries.

Imagine, then, what Franklin felt when the rector’s wife furnished the final detail: that Thomas Franklin had died on the very day of the very month, four years beforehand, that young Benjamin Franklin was born. William Franklin, like his father already struck by the similarity between his father’s career and his great-uncle’s, commented that had Thomas died four years later, those who knew the two might have supposed a transmigration of souls. As it was, Franklin could not forget the coincidence, and when he wrote his memoirs he mentioned it almost in the first breath.

After a stop
at Coventry the two Franklins traveled to Birmingham, where they sought out Deborah’s relations. Numerous aunts, uncles, and cousins survived—indeed thrived. Of one cousin of Deborah’s mother, Franklin wrote, “She is a very sensible, smart, old lady, reads a great deal and is well acquainted with books, and her conversation very agreeable, she seems to be the scholar of the family.” Regarding a cousin of Deborah’s own, Franklin said, “Mrs. Salt is a jolly, lively dame. Both
Billy and myself agree that she was extremely like you; her whole face has the same turn, and exactly the same little blue Birmingham eyes.”

Without doubt Franklin felt an emotional connection to the country whence his parents came; perhaps, in describing Deborah’s kin so warmly, he was trying to make her feel something similar. As subsequent comments would reveal, Franklin was starting to think of following William Strahan’s advice and relocating permanently to England. Needless to say, doing so would require that Deborah join him.

Even as he grew closer to ancestral England, he felt the loosening of certain ties to America. Upon his return to London he received a letter from Hugh Roberts, the charter Juntoist, reporting that two other members, Stephen Potts and William Parsons, had died. The old club was not what it once had been, having drifted away from impartial public service into the eddies of provincial politics. In his honest moments Franklin might have faulted himself, at least in part, for the change: no one had become more embroiled in politics than himself, the Junto’s founder. But whatever the reason, the club had lost some of its former appeal. And with the passing of two of its oldest members, it lost still more.

Besides reminding him how far he was from Philadelphia, the deaths of Potts and Parsons caused Franklin to reflect on human nature. “Odd characters, both of them,” he told Roberts.

Parsons, a wise man, often acted foolishly. Potts, a wit, that seldom acted wisely. If
enough
were the means to make a man happy, one had always the
means
of happiness without ever enjoying the
thing;
the other always had the
thing
without ever possessing the
means.
Parsons, even in his prosperity, always fretting! Potts, in the midst of his poverty, ever laughing! It seems, then, that happiness in this life rather depends on internals than externals; and that, besides the natural effects of wisdom and virtue, vice and folly, there is such a thing as being of a happy or an unhappy constitution.

From
what Franklin could tell, Thomas Penn was of an unhappy constitution. But then Franklin may not have been in the best position to judge, having almost nothing to do with Penn after their unproductive early meetings. An interview at the beginning of 1758 ended in a spectacular failure, alienating Penn beyond recall and casting doubts upon Franklin’s fitness for his office as agent.

The meeting was occasioned by questions involving the Indian trade on the Pennsylvania frontier. Franklin faulted the proprietors for failing to regulate the trade—or, more precisely, for preventing the Assembly from instituting reforms that would rein in the rogue traders. As before, Franklin judged the abuses of the trade largely responsible for turning the Indians against the English; combined with the proprietors’ past mistreatment of the Indians in land sales, these had made the present troubles on the frontier all but inevitable.

This ongoing quarrel provided the context for the January 1758 meeting; the immediate issue was the narrower question of whether the proprietors ought to be able to veto the appointments of commissioners chosen by the Assembly to treat with the Indians. Penn held that proprietary participation in selecting the commissioners was necessary to defend the interests of the proprietors and was fully authorized by the colony’s charter. Franklin countered that a proprietary veto guaranteed that the commissioners were mere creatures of the proprietors. Franklin went on to espouse the view that the Pennsylvania Assembly was the equivalent in provincial matters to the British House of Commons in British and imperial matters. In support of this position he cited Thomas Penn’s own father, William Penn, whose charter for Pennsylvania declared that the Assembly of Pennsylvania should have all the power and privileges of an assembly according to the rights of the freeborn subjects of England. Thomas Penn answered that this was more than his father was empowered to grant under the royal charter creating Pennsylvania and therefore had no validity. Franklin replied that if such was true, all the people who were drawn to Pennsylvania under the belief that they would have such privileges had been deceived, cheated, and betrayed. To which Penn responded that they should have looked out for themselves; the royal charter was no secret. If they were deceived, it was their own fault.

“That,” wrote Franklin, referring to Penn’s last remark, “he said with a kind of triumphing laughing insolence, such as a low jockey might do when a purchaser complained that he had cheated him in a horse.” Franklin added, “I was astonished to see him thus meanly give up his father’s character, and conceived that moment a more cordial and thorough contempt for him than I ever before felt for any man living—a contempt that I cannot express in words, but I believe my countenance expressed it strongly. And that his brother was looking at me, must have observed it. However, finding myself grow warm I made no other answer to this than that the poor people were no lawyers themselves and, confiding in his father, did not think it necessary to consult any.”