The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (36 page)

Yet God was watching over the attackers, as their preachers had promised. At least so it seemed by the evidence of the first engagements. The French defenders fell for a feint that allowed the landing party to establish a beachhead with but minor casualties. Two days later Providence smiled again, persuading the French, who could see they were badly outnumbered, to consolidate their forces in the town itself. They abandoned the Grand Battery, spiking the guns there but unaccountably failing to blow up the magazine and destroy the structure. As it turned out, their spiking operation failed as well: the clever New Englanders had brought along blacksmiths and special tools, and dislodged the spikes from the powder holes of the guns. These they trained upon the walls of Louisbourg proper.

William Pepperell was no waster of human life; neither was Peter Warren, the commander of the squadron of the Royal Navy recently
arrived to reinforce the Americans. “To prevent the effusion of Christian blood,” as they put it, they called upon the French commander to surrender. The messenger sent to deliver the proposed terms was duly blindfolded at the gate of the town and conducted to the headquarters of Governor Louis du Chambon. The governor disdained these untested, untrained attackers, even if they had him cornered; equally to the point, he hoped for the arrival of a French naval squadron that would raise the siege. “The King of France, our King,” he answered, having turned the blindfolded envoy around and sent him back out the west gate, “has given us the responsibility of defending this city; we cannot, except after the most vigorous attack, consider a similar proposition. The only reply we make to this demand is from the mouths of our cannon.”

The Anglophone artillery spoke louder. The Americans heated their iron balls to glowing before firing them over the walls, where they set many of the wood-frame houses ablaze. Reports of the approach of several hundred French and Indian soldiers received credibility from the actual sighting of a French warship; together these developments caused Pepperell to escalate the siege into a direct assault. To secure his flank he ordered an attack on the island battery. The first such attack fizzled when the attackers bolstered their courage excessively with rum and arrived at the beach too drunk to make the crossing. A second landing, launched at night, clandestinely secured a beachhead on the island, but one hero spoiled the surprise by leading his comrades in a rousing cheer, which alerted the French sentries and triggered a near-massacre of the landing party.

Yet fortune refused to abandon the Americans. The continued pounding of the town, combined with some well-advertised preparations for a joint sea-land assault on the fortress, persuaded du Chambon to reconsider capitulation. He tested the idea on the leading merchants and citizens of Louisbourg, who urged him to surrender lest their property be destroyed. Satisfied he would not have to bear blame alone, he sued for peace. Pepperell and Warren accepted.

The news of the victory traveled fast. In Philadelphia, Franklin made it a lead item in the
Gazette:

Wednesday last, a great number of guns were distinctly heard in several places round this city, the occasion of which, as well as the place where they were fired, was unknown until the evening of the day following, when an express arrived with advice of the surrender of Louisbourg, which had caused great rejoicings at New York. ’Twas near nine o’clock when the express came in, yet the news flying instantly round the town, upwards of 20 bonfires were immediately lighted in the streets. The next day was spent in feasting, and drinking the healths of Governor Shirley, Gen. Pepperell, Com. Warren, &c. &c. under the discharge of cannon from the wharfs and vessels in the river; and the evening concluded with bonfires, illuminations, and other demonstrations of joy. A mob gathered, and began to break the windows of those houses that were not illuminated, but it was soon dispersed, and suppressed.

Not surprisingly, the Americans acquired a high opinion of their prowess at war. Those who participated in the conquest itself took home a comment by the French port captain at Louisbourg, that he had first thought the New England men cowards but had changed his mind: “If they had a pick ax and spade, they would dig their way to hell and storm it.” Echoes from across the Atlantic swelled the American heads still further. The
Gentleman’s Magazine
threw laurels:

Hail, heroes born for action, not for show! Who leave toupees and powder to the beau, To war’s dull pedants tedious rules of art, And know to conquer by a dauntless heart. Rough English virtue gives your deeds to fame And o’er the Old exalts New England’s name.

Although the greatest honor accrued to those who actually fought at Louisbourg, the glow warmed hearts all over America. It fostered a belief that England depended on America for defense—frontier defense, anyway—rather than vice versa. Americans could stand on their own.

From the belief
they
could
stand on their own to the conclusion that they
should
stand on their own required another generation and a half, but the seeds of independence were germinating in the soil of colonial self-help. Although Ben Franklin, a city boy from birth, knew next to nothing of plowing and planting, on this subject he helped loosen the ground from which the shoots would emerge.

To the surprise of the myopic among the Americans, and to the disappointment of even the perspicacious, the victory at Louisbourg did not end the war. Indeed, it had little effect at all beyond demoralizing the
New Englanders who now had to garrison that chilly and forbidding rock, as the same task had demoralized the French. On the frontier, raiding parties of French and Indians beset isolated villages. In one notorious incident of November 1745, a band of three hundred French Canadians and two hundred Indians swept down upon the undefended village of Saratoga, New York, killing thirty, taking two or three times that many captive, and burning much of what could not be carried away.

Massachusetts Governor Shirley, whose wave of fame from Louisbourg had yet to break, advocated an encore: an invasion of Canada. The goal was to thrust the French finally out of America; with the French gone, their Indian allies would have to come to terms with the English, as the Iroquois, for example, had already done. When King George II bestowed his royal approval upon the project, the other colonies were obliged to participate. Pennsylvania’s official cooperation came grudgingly; the Assembly loosened the purse strings with typical reluctance. Unofficially the Pennsylvanians betrayed greater eagerness. Four companies of volunteers rallied to the colors and prepared to march to Albany to join the rest of the invasion force.

Among the volunteers was William Franklin. Fifteen-year-old Billy was showing the same rebelliousness his father had evinced at that age. The boy’s existence was, in material respects, easier than the father’s had been. In previous years Benjamin had bought Billy a pony to ride; he engaged a tutor to instruct him in reading and writing and numbers; he sent him to study with the best teacher of mathematics in the city; he enrolled him in the academy where the sons of the city’s gentry received the finest classical education.

But Billy grew bored and, like his father, found himself drawn to dockside. The ships that lined the Delaware waterfront, like those of Benjamin’s Boston, came from all over the world; they promised adventures untold—or at least an escape from a life that weighed increasingly upon Billy’s broadening shoulders. Much as Ben had longed to do but been dissuaded, Billy packed a small kit, walked the few blocks to the quay, and sought a vessel to ship out on.

It was Billy’s good luck, or so it initially seemed, that there was a war in progress. The waterfront was full of privateers, licensed pirates who needed hands for their dangerous but potentially lucrative work. One first mate liked Billy’s looks and signed him aboard. But before the craft weighed anchor, Ben discovered the boy’s absence and hurried to the wharf. After a brief search he found the lad and unceremoniously fetched him home.

Franklin declined to blame himself for Billy’s attempted escape. “No one imagined it was hard usage at home that made him do this,” he explained to his sister Jane. “Every one that knows me thinks I am too indulgent a parent.” Remembering his own youth, he attributed Billy’s restlessness to his age and to the allure of what the privateers might win. “When boys see prizes brought in, and quantities of money shared among the men, and their gay living, it fills their heads with notions.”

Franklin did not presume to banish those notions; such would be a fool’s errand. Instead he sought to redirect them slightly, from the unforgiving sea to the somewhat safer land. He let Billy know he would not object if the boy enlisted among the volunteers for the Canada expedition. Billy happily took the offer. Delighted at putting whatever distance between himself and his home—yet unaware that in doing so he was simultaneously putting himself on a path that would lead to a terminal distancing from his father—Ensign William Franklin marched up the road toward Albany in the service of his king.

At forty
Franklin felt no desire to head off to Canada himself. Yet he supported the idea of colonial defense, and when the Assembly continued to ignore the necessities of provincial security, he took up the weapon he had long since mastered: the printing press. In the autumn of 1747 he wrote and published a pamphlet entitled
Plain Truth: Or, Serious Considerations on the Present State of the City of Philadelphia and Province of Pennsylvania.
“War at this time rages over a great part of the known world,” he declared. “Our news-papers are weekly filled with fresh accounts of the destruction it every where occasions.” Heretofore Pennsylvania had been spared the worst of the violence, Franklin said, but this was due to an accident of geography—that Pennsylvania was surrounded by other colonies more directly in the line of fire—rather than the exertions of its inhabitants. Such safety as circumstance afforded could not be expected to last. Philadelphia’s wealth supplied a strong inducement to attack by enemy privateers or warships, an inducement the city’s defenseless condition only intensified. As for the countryside beyond the city, it lay open to assault by Indians allied to the French. To be sure, Pennsylvania’s enlightened policies had won over the most important of the neighboring tribes, but the loyalty of those tribes could hardly be taken for granted when France aided their enemies and neither England nor Pennsylvania provided countervailing assistance.

Should the tissue of what passed for provincial defense be torn, the consequence for Philadelphians would be swift and brutal:

On the first alarm, terror will spread over all; and as no man can with certainty depend that another will stand by him, beyond doubt very many will seek safety by a speedy flight. Those that are reputed rich will flee through fear of torture to make them produce more than they are able. The man that has a wife and children will find them hanging on his neck, beseeching him with tears to quit the city, and save his life, to guide and protect them in that time of general desolation and ruin. All will run into confusion, amidst cries and lamentations.

If such were the case in the event of advance alarm, what would happen if the blow fell by surprise?

Confined to your houses, you will have nothing to trust to but the enemy’s mercy. Your best fortune will be to fall under the power of commanders of king’s ships, able to control the mariners, and not into the hands of
licentious privateers.
Who can, without the utmost horror, conceive the miseries of the latter! when your persons, fortunes, wives and daughters, shall be subject to the wanton and unbridled rage, rapine and lust, of
Negroes, Molattoes,
and others, the vilest and most abandoned of mankind. A dreadful scene!

The author of this lurid forecast identified himself only as “A Tradesman of Philadelphia,” and it was as a tradesman that Franklin made his appeal. Neither the party of religion—the Quakers—nor the party of wealth—the rich merchants and their allies—had lifted a finger in defense of the city. Between the “mistaken principles of religion” of the former and the “pride, envy and implacable resentment” of the latter, the lives and fortunes of “the middling people, the farmers, shopkeepers and tradesmen of this city and country” were in the dire jeopardy they faced. Franklin called on the middling classes to seize control of their fate: