Biographies & Memoirs

13

Imperialist

1759–60

 On the Plains of Abraham, high above the St. Lawrence River, where the St. Charles River entered the larger stream and formed a point on which the French had built the fortress of Quebec, in the summer of 1759 the struggle for North America drew to a climax. That it did so was the work of one man more than any other.

William Pitt first won fame with a wicked tongue in the House of Commons. When George II put 16,000 troops from his native Hanover on the British payroll, Pitt denounced the move as reducing England to the status of “a province to a despicable electorate.” Pitt characterized John Carteret, the courtier generally held responsible for the king’s pro-German policy (and a man with a weakness for burgundy), as one who “seemed to have drunk of the potion described in poetic fictions, which makes men forget their country.”

George did not appreciate having his favorites so described; still less did he like hearing his homeland called a “despicable electorate.” But such was Pitt’s strength in Commons that after the disappointments of first phase of the Seven years’ War (as Europe dubbed the struggle that began with Braddock’s defeat in western Pennsylvania), the monarch decided he had no choice but to turn to the “Great Commoner.” Pitt agreed; with typical egotism he asserted, “I am sure I can save the country and nobody else can.”

What Pitt knew—besides the fact that he must be England’s savior—was that salvation would be found not in Europe but overseas. The American colonies might occupy the frontier of the British empire, but they became the center of Pitt’s strategy. He ordered an attack on Louisbourg, which succeeded in July 1758. He sent a new force against Fort Duquesne; this effort also succeeded. When the retreating French blew up the fort, the victorious British troops built a fort of their own and named it for Pitt.

But the hinge of Pitt’s American strategy, and the fulcrum of empire for both Britain and France, was the assault on Quebec. Pitt’s ministry gave the command to James Wolfe, a major general just thirty-three years old, who would lead a force of some 8,000 against the Canadian town. He would, that is, if he could get the men up the St. Lawrence from the sea. Admiral Charles Saunders had overall authority for transport, but the hazardous negotiation of the shallows and eddies of the vexing river fell to Captain James Cook. Although Cook’s destiny awaited him in the Pacific, the French were plenty impressed at his work in the St. Lawrence. “The enemy have passed sixty ships of war where we dare not risk a vessel of a hundred tons by night and day,” declared the suddenly worried Canadian governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil.

Though reaching Quebec was half the battle, the other half was harder. The site of the city afforded its greatest protection, with the St. Lawrence on the east and south, the St. Charles on the north, and the third side of the triangle commanded by the Plains of Abraham, which in turn were protected from the St. Lawrence by an intimidating escarpment. The French commander, the Marquis de Montcalm, was so confident that the bluff could not be scaled that he did not bother to defend it.

Wolfe initially agreed with Montcalm’s assessment. He landed his troops below the city and tried every trick he could conceive to lure Montcalm away from the city into an open fight. Montcalm refused to be drawn. Wolfe sent a detachment to capture Point Lévis across the St. Lawrence from the city, at a place where the stream abruptly narrowed from a mile and a half to three-quarters of a mile (this narrowing was what gave Quebec its name—an Algonquin word meaning “strait” or “narrow”). From Point Lévis, British cannon bombarded the city. Montcalm remained unmoved.

Yet if position favored Montcalm, time did not. Provisioning the city posed a growing problem. Obviously no supplies would be coming up the river, which was now covered with British warships. Should Saunders and Cook proceed upstream, they might well cut the French supply lines from the interior. For this reason Montcalm could not simply wait for winter’s ice to freeze out his attackers.

So he tried fire instead. Torching seven of his own vessels, he cast them upon the current in the direction of the British squadron. All eyes on both sides of the river followed the floating infernos as they bore down on the attackers, but between the waywardness of the flow and the watchfulness of British boatmen who hooked the most threatening craft and pulled them aside, the incendiary ships drifted harmlessly away.

Weeks passed, then months. The British could not lure Montcalm from his redoubt. In frustration Wolfe sent rangers up and down the river to destroy whatever might give aid or comfort to the enemy. More than a thousand homes and farms were ravaged in the process, but Quebec remained untouched. One impetuous action by some British grenadiers against the French emplacements below the city produced—amid rain, thunder, mud and misfiring muskets—a sharp rebuke by the French. “Everything proves that the grand design of the English has failed,” wrote Governor Vaudreuil.

Wolfe fell sick under the strain. Feverish, his high hopes from the spring fading as the frosts of autumn approached, the British general turned to his lieutenants for ideas. They urged a landing miles upriver from Quebec, beyond the cliffs; from there the city could be approached overland. Wolfe assented, and preparations for moving some 3,500 men fifteen miles upstream commenced.

But rain delayed the operation, in the process intensifying Wolfe’s anxiety. He had a boat crew row him up and down the river, seeking something he had overlooked, some weakness in the enemy’s defenses. Several days into September he found it: a narrow strip of land on a tiny cove directly below the heights of Abraham’s plain. Reconnaissance suggested that an ascent might conceivably be accomplished via a steep, treacherous path. Artillery in any numbers was out of the question, but lightly burdened infantry might manage the climb.

Wolfe determined to try. With 1,800 men, in the dead of night on September 12, he floated silently down the river to the cove. Through deserters the British commander had learned that a French supply convoy was scheduled to arrive that night; in fact it had been canceled, but, as British luck would have it, the officer in charge failed to notify Quebec of the cancellation. When a French sentry, hearing the British boats in the darkness, called out, a French-speaking British captain convincingly responded, “Vive le roi!”

At four in the morning the lead boats landed. Wolfe and Lieutenant Colonel William Howe led an ascent by a select squadron up the steep side of the cliff; hand over hand, clinging to roots and rocks, they scaled the bluff to surprise the guards at the top of the winding path. Before being overpowered, the guards managed to send a message into the city, but by the time Montcalm could react, the rest of Wolfe’s landing party of 4,500 had climbed the path.

This ascent was either a brilliant stroke or a stupid one, depending on what happened next. The French outnumbered the British and had the better position. If the redcoats got into trouble, the same steep slope that had been so difficult to surmount on the attack would be even more difficult in retreat—in confusion and under fire. For Wolfe and the British, on the Plains of Abraham it was triumph or die.

Wolfe did both. Montcalm, alarmed at the sudden appearance of his enemy where they were least expected, ordered an immediate attack. The French forces advanced bravely but in poor order; irregulars among the ranks fired from too far away to inflict much damage on the British. Wolfe meanwhile commanded his men to hold their fire. The French came closer, closer, closer—until at forty paces Wolfe gave the order. The British volley decimated the French line, which staggered and broke. Montcalm’s troops fell back, fighting as they went. Wolfe, leading the pursuit from the front, took a ball in the wrist, then one in the groin, then one in the lung. Dying, he gave a final order to cut off the French retreat, before declaring, “Now, God be praised, I will die in peace.”

Montcalm died no less heroically but considerably less happy. Wounded in the retreat, the French general survived long enough to appreciate the extent of his failure. Those French troops that could leave the city fled to the west; those that could not were captured and transported to France. The French fleur-de-lis was struck from the ramparts of the citadel above the St. Lawrence; the British Union Jack went up in its place. Canada was not yet British, but Quebec, the key to Canada, was.

 It was a glorious victory, and recognized as such, but, to the astonishment of Franklin and his fellow Americans, the victory looked likely to be undone even before the glow of its doing diminished. The capture of Louisbourg, Duquesne, and Quebec, combined with other victories in America, as well as thrashings of the French in India and Europe and on the high seas, augured an auspicious peace for Britain. But any peace with France would be negotiated rather than dictated, partly because Britain’s triumphs at arms, stunning though they were, did not warrant dictation, and partly because Britain’s foreign policy was premised on a maintenance, rather than destruction, of the European balance of power. Britain would have to live with France; it therefore behooved the British to leave a France they could live with. The question for Britain’s negotiators was how much of what the nation’s armies had won in the field its diplomats ought to retain at the bargaining table.

As after the previous round of fighting, the Americans discovered that their interests counted for little in the thinking of Britain’s leaders. The news of the capture of Quebec had hardly reached London before interested parties began talking of handing Canada back to the French. British forces had captured Guadeloupe, the French sugar island in the West Indies, during that same glorious season; on the assumption that one or the other would have to be restored to France, influential voices in England advocated keeping Guadeloupe and returning Canada.

Franklin accounted such a course the height of folly. Had the British government learned nothing from this latest round of conflict with France? Had a peace treaty that left France in control of Canada ever led to anything but another war?

Franklin initially employed satire against the arguments for the return of Canada, thinking folly should be met with derision. He wrote a letter to the London Chronicle adducing a list of absurdities arguing for return, among them that British commerce was already too great and could not stand the increase certain to follow access to all of Canada; that a surfeit of beaver pelts would drive down prices for the broad-brimmed hats favored by “that unmannerly sect, the Quakers”; that England ought soon to have another costly war in order to avoid the dangers of becoming too rich; that the French Indians might continue their scalping campaigns against the colonists and thus prevent the colonies from growing too strong; that the English tradition of fighting bravely but negotiating meekly should continue unbroken (“Otherwise we shall be inconsistent with ourselves”).

Franklin’s barbs glanced off, and the campaign for restoration of Canada gained strength. In light of the seriousness of the threat, Franklin himself grew more serious. In April 1760 he published a pamphlet with the sober title The Interest of Great Britain Considered, with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadeloupe. He left off his name, after the custom (his and the era’s) of anonymity and in recognition that as the agent of Pennsylvania he might be accused of special pleading. Yet though he spoke as a loyal subject of King George, close reading suggested that anyone this conversant with circumstances on the North American frontier must be a colonial. And even a cursory reading indicated that the author possessed a powerful mind, one that might benefit Britain—or endanger Britain, if it came to that.

Advocates of returning Canada to France contended that imperial security in North America might be guaranteed by the judicious placement of well-provisioned forts and the control of key mountain passes. Such statements, Franklin asserted, betrayed an utter ignorance of frontier warfare. “Security will not be obtained by such forts, unless they were connected by a wall like that of China, from one end of our settlements to the other.” As for the passes, “If the Indians, when at war, marched like the Europeans, with great armies, heavy cannon, baggage and carriages, the passes through which alone such armies could penetrate our country or receive their supplies, being secured, all might be sufficiently secure.” But the reality was wildly different. “They go to war, as they call it, in small parties, from fifty men down to five. Their hunting life has made them acquainted with the whole country, and scarce any part of it is impracticable to such a party. They can travel through the woods even by night, and know how to conceal their tracks. They pass easily between your forts undiscovered.” They required no convoys of provisions, instead living off the land. Nor was there any punishing them after the fact. “When they have surprised separately and murdered and scalped a dozen families, they are gone with inconceivable expedition through unknown ways, and ’tis very rare that pursuers have any chance of coming up with them.” In short, as long as France held Canada, it would hold the English settlers in America hostage. And unless the British government was willing to abandon those settlers to a ghastly fate, it must be prepared to fight more wars like the last two.

Another argument for Guadeloupe over Canada marshaled the theories of the mercantilists, who as always decried the drain of cash from the home economy. In the two centuries since the first planting of sugarcane in the West Indies, the English had developed quite a sweet tooth; supporting their sucrose habit tipped the balance of payments in an adverse direction. Bringing Guadeloupe into the empire would alleviate the imbalance without forcing the British to forgo their sweets.

Against this argument Franklin employed what might have been called a neo-mercantilist argument. In the early days of the European empires, colonies had been seen as territories to exploit, and perhaps proselytize, but hardly to settle. For the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French, the original model of nonsettlement remained the rule, as it did for the British colonies in the tropics. But in North America the original population of religious dissenters and fortune-seekers had flourished, until the number of North Americans in the British empire equaled a substantial fraction of the population of Britain itself. And, for reasons Franklin had explained in his pamphlet on population growth—reasons he reiterated in summary here—the number of North Americans would continue to grow, perhaps one day surpassing the population of the home country.

This growing population, Franklin noted, provided an obvious clientele for the manufactures of England. In mercantilist terms of effect on the balance of trade, the export of manufactures to the colonies might be fully as beneficial as the import of sugar or tea. Moreover, while the trade in sugar had reached maturity—the islands were limited in size, and supported all the plantations they would ever be able to support—the North American trade would continue to grow, almost without limit. Citing the case of Pennsylvania, Franklin pointed out that exports to that province had multiplied by seventeen times in scarcely more than a generation. Such an extreme rate of increase might not continue, but the general trend certainly would. The trade with North America already eclipsed that with the West Indies; with each year the Indies would fall further into the shade.

Some in the contra-Canada camp used the growth of the North American colonies against them, contending that as they grew they would compete with the home country in manufactures. All the more reason for keeping Canada, replied Franklin, denying the conclusion even as he accepted the concern it reflected. What prevented the development of manufactures in the colonies was not legal prohibition but the cheapness of land. Again echoing his earlier pamphlet, he asserted, “All the penal and prohibitory laws that were ever thought on will not be sufficient to prevent manufactures in a country whose inhabitants surpass the number that can subsist by the husbandry of it.” To return Canada to the French would bottle up the British population between the seaboard and the mountains, thereby producing, if not in this generation, then in the next or the next after that, precisely the situation British manufacturers wanted to prevent. To open up Canada to British settlement would have the opposite effect. “While there is land enough in America for our people, there can never be manufactures to any amount or value.”

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.”

If Franklin’s countenance had not made his contempt for the proprietors plain, these very words did, for not long after they reached their intended audience—Isaac Norris—they found their way to friends of the proprietors in Pennsylvania. From there they were relayed back to Thomas Penn, who denounced Franklin’s letter as “a most impudent paper and a vile misrepresentation of what passed.” Penn asserted that it was as unsafe for the people of Pennsylvania as for the proprietors to claim privileges not warranted by the king’s charter, and that it was only out of concern for the people that he had spoken as he had. He did “not exult at all on the occasion” and had given Franklin no just cause for offense—certainly no such offense as he had taken. “How Mr. Franklin looked I cannot tell,” Penn added. “My brother says like a malicious V. [villain], as he always does.” But patience had its limits. “From this time I will not have any conversation with him on any pretence.”

Franklin was angry to learn that his enemies were reading his mail, but despite some second thoughts on language he stood by his judgment. “I still see nothing in the letter but what was proper for me to write, as you ought to be acquainted with every thing that is of importance to your affairs,” he wrote to Joseph Galloway, who at this time was an important Franklin ally in the Assembly. “And it is of no small importance to know what sort of a man we have to deal with, and how base his principles. I might indeed have spared the comparison of Thomas to a low jockey who triumphed with insolence when a purchaser complained of being cheated in a horse, an expression the Dr. [Fothergill, who had told Franklin of Penn’s feelings about the letter] particularly remarked as harsh and unguarded. I might have left his conduct and sentiments to your reflections, and contented myself with a bare recital of what passed; but indignation extorted it from me, and I cannot yet say that I repent much of it.” If anything, Franklin took continued satisfaction. “It sticks in his liver, and e’en let him bear what he so well deserves.” Poor Richard could have told Thomas Penn what to expect. “By obtaining copies of our private correspondence, he has added another instance confirming the old adage, that listeners seldom hear any good of themselves.”

The bad feelings between Franklin and Thomas Penn certainly did nothing good for accommodation between the Assembly and the proprietors. In November 1758, after a delay of more than a year, the Penns finally delivered their response to Franklin’s original complaints. Ferdinand Paris placed the burden of obstruction on Franklin’s shoulders, although without deigning to name him; reaffirming his clients’ commitment to “that harmony which they most sincerely desire,” the Penns’ lawyer lamented that the Assembly had not designated some “person of candour” as its representative to the discussions. Paris went on to assert that the members of the Assembly had not pointed out “clearly and distinctly any grievances they thought themselves under.”

Franklin could dismiss the lack-of-candor charge as ad hominem flummery; the assertion that he had failed to delineate Pennsylvania’s grievances rang hollow when the proprietors would not even respond to his general complaints. More troublesome was the crux of the proprietors’ argument: “The Charter (when read in its own language) gives the power to make laws to the Proprietary.” The role of the Assembly was to provide “advice and assent,” but the initiative rested with the proprietors. This was just the opposite of the view of Franklin and the Assembly, who judged the initiative in lawmaking to reside in the people, with the proprietors reduced to the advise-and-assent role.

The personal animus between Franklin and the Penns continued to obscure this essential political difference. Bypassing Franklin, Thomas and Richard Penn wrote directly to the Pennsylvania Assembly charging Franklin with “disrespect,” again aspersing his “candour,” and asserting that fruitful relations between Assembly and proprietors necessitated “a very different representation.” Franklin attacked the proprietors’ response as of a piece with all of their actions. “I need not point out to you the studied obscurity and uncertainty of their answer, nor the mean chicanery of their whole proceeding,” he wrote Isaac Norris. Franklin added, “Thus a final end is put to all farther negotiation between them and me.”

Yet this hardly ended the struggle between the people of Pennsylvania and the proprietors. To Franklin it simply suggested a change of venue. Form required his offering to resign as the Assembly’s agent. “The House will see that if they purpose to continue treating with the proprietors, it will be necessary to recall me and appoint another person or persons for that service, who are likely to be more acceptable or more pliant than I am, or, as the Proprietors express it, persons of candour.”

But he advised against this, suggesting instead the radical alternative of replacing rule by the Penns with rule by the Crown. “If the House, grown at length sensible of the danger to the liberties of the people necessarily arising from such growing power and property in one family with such principles, shall think it expedient to have the government and property in different hands, and for that purpose shall desire that the Crown would take the province into its immediate care, I believe that point might without much difficulty be carried, and our privileges preserved.” He added, “In that I think I could still do service.”

Not many years would pass before Franklin’s preference for Crown rule above propriety rule would appear hopelessly naïve. At the moment it reflected both his terminal contempt for Thomas Penn and his increasing enchantment with things British.

 That his son William shared his enchantment increased it the more. Before leaving Philadelphia, William had fallen in love. Elizabeth Graeme was the belle of the city—bright, vivacious, beautiful. Her father, Thomas Graeme, was wealthy and distinguished, a leading member of the proprietary party. This political connection bothered Franklin somewhat—and may have contributed to his invitation to William to accompany him to England. If so, the strategy worked, for merry London soon banished thoughts of Betsy. “The infinite variety of new objects, the continued noise and bustle in the streets, and the viewing such things as were esteemed most curious, engrossed all my attention,” he wrote Betsy, by way of explaining why he had not written earlier.

Whether or not Franklin had intended the relationship to end this way, he did not mourn its demise. Yet at times he must have wished that William had remained faithful to his lover across the sea. Just as Franklin himself had done in his own youth, William began consorting with the “low women” of London. And just as Franklin had done, William fathered a son out of wedlock. William Temple Franklin was born about 1760. His mother was as lost to history as William Franklin’s own mother.

A bastard child had not been convenient to Franklin three decades earlier, but he took it in. William made a different decision—perhaps from his own experience growing up a bastard and a stepchild. He put William Temple in a foster home and for some years disguised his connection to the boy. Franklin almost certainly felt inhibited from criticizing his son on this point; he paid the bills for his grandson and kept quiet.

Otherwise William’s life went according to plan. He entered the Middle Temple shortly after arrival in London; by the end of the following year he had completed his law studies and put on the gown of the barrister. Franklin’s pride in his son was matched by his appreciation of William’s usefulness. No lawyer himself, and a failed judge, Franklin valued William’s advice on the legal points of the dispute with the Penns.

 William joined his father on a journey to Scotland in the late summer and autumn of 1759. Edinburgh had asked to honor Franklin; upon arrival he was named a burgess and guild-brother of the city. Glasgow presented a similar award. St. Andrews bestowed the freedom of the burgh.

With continued repetition such notice would lose some of its appeal; for now each mark of esteem delighted him. Equally delightful were the friends Franklin made on this trip. Sir Alexander Dick and Lady Dick knew Franklin by reputation; on hearing of the Franklins’ visit they invited father and son to stay with them at Prestonfield, their manor near Edinburgh. Sir Alexander, like several of Franklin’s admirers, was a physician and more; at the time of Franklin’s visit, he was president of Edinburgh’s College of Physicians and a member of the Edinburgh Philosophical Society. He would help found the Royal Society of Edinburgh some years hence, but only after winning a gold medal for growing the best rhubarb in Britain.

Franklin charmed Sir Alexander and Lady Dick and the assorted guests they brought to meet the marvelous American. Franklin was in fine form, reciting one of his literary hoaxes, a blasphemous revision of the Bible, contending for religious toleration. The first verses of this chapter recounted how Abraham received a visitor, an old man bowed with age. Abraham offered him food and a place to sleep, only to be dismayed when the visitor failed to bless Abraham’s God. Annoyed, Abraham queried why he did not.

7. And the man answered and said, I do not worship the God thou speakest of; neither do I call upon his name; for I have made to myself a God, which abideth always in mine house, and provideth me with all things.

8. And Abraham’s zeal was kindled against the man; and he arose, and fell upon him, and drove him forth with blows into the wilderness.

9. And at midnight God called unto Abraham, saying, Abraham, where is thy stranger?

10. And Abraham answered and said, Lord, he would not worship thee; neither would he call upon thy name. Therefore have I driven him out from before my face into the wilderness.

11. And God said, Have I borne with him these hundred ninety and eight years, and nourished him, and clothed him, notwithstanding his rebellion against me, and couldst not thou, that art thyself a sinner, bear with him one night?

Lady Dick insisted that Franklin send her a copy of this “Parable Against Persecution,” as it came to be called; so also did Lord Kames, a Scottish jurist who had a reputation as a hanging judge but otherwise was a merry fellow. Franklin and William spent a few days with Kames and his family. While William conversed with the young people of the household, Franklin and Kames rode about the neighborhood on horseback, philosophizing about law, agriculture, mechanics, fish, religion, fireplaces, population growth, and history.

Upon returning to London, Franklin wrote Kames regretting that he and William had not had the company of the lord and his lady on the long journey south. “We could have beguiled the way by discoursing 1000 things that now we may never have an opportunity of considering together; for conversation warms the mind, enlivens the imagination, and is continually starting fresh game that is immediately pursued and taken.”

Retrieving a thread of their conversations, Franklin raised the critical issue of Canada. “No one can rejoice more sincerely than I do on the reduction of Canada; and this, not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a Briton.”

And not merely a Briton, but a British imperialist—one with a vision grander than almost any found in Whitehall or Westminster.

I have long been of opinion that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though, like other foundations, they are low and little seen, they are nevertheless broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure human wisdom ever yet erected.

For this reason Canada must be retained.

If we keep it, all the country from the St. Lawrence to Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people. Britain itself will become vastly more populous by the immense increase of its commerce; the Atlantic Sea will be covered with your trading ships; and your naval power thence continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole globe, and awe the world!

Evidently Kames had not shared all of Franklin’s grand vision, for Franklin terminated this part of his letter: “But I refrain, for I see you begin to think my notions extravagant, and look upon them as the ravings of a mad prophet.”

Yet the prophet was not without honor in his own country—that country being the one he shared with Kames and Collinson and the dons of Cambridge and the guild-brothers of Edinburgh. The honors he had received and the friends he had made since arriving in Britain were enough to win any man; this recent trip to the north of the United Kingdom added further friendships to still more honors. Franklin wrote Kames, “The time we spent there was six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life. And the agreeable and instructive society we found there in such plenty has left so pleasing an impression on my memory that, did not strong connections draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the country I should choose to spend the remainder of my days in.”

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