The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (51 page)

While Morris defended the proprietors’ interests, Franklin spoke for the people of Pennsylvania. As before, he sat on all the most important committees of the Assembly; even more than before, he drafted the most important documents to emerge from the Assembly. During the second half of 1755 the contest between the proprietors and the Assembly became a duel between Morris and Franklin.

In late July the Assembly received the stunning news of Braddock’s defeat. The body quickly authorized the expenditure of £50,000 for provincial defense. To raise the money, the Assembly approved a property tax, applicable to all real and personal property within the province.

The governor received the tax bill in early August; he shortly returned it, unapproved, with suggestions for amendment that would exempt the proprietary estates.

Franklin drafted the Assembly’s response, the gist of which was that taxing the proprietary estates, along with all the other estates in the province, was “perfectly equitable and just.” Tactically trying to corner the governor, Franklin and his colleagues requested to know whether the governor’s veto reflected his reasoned judgment or a previous commitment to the proprietors. If the former were the case, the Assembly would be pleased for the governor to elaborate his thinking; if the latter, it would only waste everyone’s time to pursue this bill.

Morris defended his veto on its merits—thereby initiating a series of exchanges that were never particularly enlightening and grew less edifying with each round. Franklin singled out the governor for personal attack, branding him the enemy not only of provincial safety but of the cherished rights of Englishmen.

How odious it must be to a sensible manly people, to find
him
who ought to be their father and protector, taking advantage of public calamity and distress, and their tenderness for their bleeding country, to force down their throats laws of imposition, abhorrent to common justice and common reason! Why will the Governor make himself the hateful instrument of reducing a free people to the abject state of vassalage; of depriving us of those liberties which have given reputation to our country throughout the world, and drawn inhabitants from the remotest parts of Europe to enjoy them?

Eventually the governor admitted that the terms of his commission prohibited his accepting any measure that taxed the proprietary estates. This prompted Franklin to take on the proprietors themselves. Morris had objected to Franklin’s use of the word “vassalage” to describe the situation of the Pennsylvanians; Franklin answered that in fact their condition was worse than that of vassals. “Vassals must
follow
their lords to the wars in defence of their lands; our Lord Proprietary, though a subject like ourselves, would
send
us out to fight
for
him, while he keeps himself a
thousand leagues remote from danger! Vassals fight at their lord’s expence, but our lord would have us defend his estate at our own expence! This is not merely vassalage, it is worse than any vassalage we have heard of; it is something we have no adequate name for; it is even more slavish than slavery itself.”

Within a short generation this language of slavery would characterize colonial complaints against the government of Britain itself. Franklin and the Pennsylvanians anticipated affairs by applying it to their proprietor.

Yet if Franklin was precocious, he was not foolish. Morris charged that the logical terminus of the Assembly’s line of argument was democracy—a concept that in the mid-eighteenth century was commonly equated with anarchy. Franklin would grow more democratic with age, but at this point he refused Morris’s bait. “We are not so absurd as to ‘design a Democracy,’ of which the Governor is pleased to accuse us,” he wrote. If anyone, it was Morris who was bringing democracy closer, by his adamancy in defense of the proprietors. “Such a conduct in a Governor appears to us the most likely thing in the world to make people incline to a Democracy, who would otherwise never think of it.”

Looking back on the fight with Morris, Franklin later conceded its intemperate nature. “Our answers as well as his messages were often tart, and sometimes indecently abusive. And as he knew I wrote for the Assembly, one might have imagined that when we met we could hardly avoid cutting throats.”

Yet in the governor Franklin found a kindred temperament, if not a kindred intellect. Politics aside, Morris was as reasonable as Franklin. “He was so good-natured a man that no personal difference between him and me was occasioned by the contest, and we often dined together.” At one of these dinners Morris remarked jokingly that he much admired the idea of Sancho Panza, the companion and foil of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, who, when offered a government, requested that it be a government of Africans, as then, if he could not agree with his black subjects, he might sell them for slaves. A friend of Morris, seated next to Franklin, picked up the governor’s theme (perhaps by previous arrangement). “Franklin,” he queried, “why do you continue to side with these damned Quakers? Had you not better sell them? The Proprietor would give you a good price.” Franklin responded, “The Governor has not yet blacked them enough.” In his recollection Franklin went on to say of Morris (and of himself), “He had indeed laboured hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wiped off his colouring as fast as he laid it on, and placed it in return thick upon his own face.”

At the time, and privately, Franklin reckoned Morris “the rashest and most indiscreet Governor that I have known.” This made him difficult to deal with, but might yet work to the advantage of the Assembly and the people. “He has 1000 little arts to provoke and irritate the people, but none to gain their good-will, esteem or confidence, without which public business must go on heavily, or not at all.” Such being the case, Franklin thought, Morris would “do more mischief to the Proprietaries’ interest than good, and make them more enemies than friends.”

The only question was whether the province could hold out till then. “We are all in flames,” Franklin told Peter Collinson.

Amid the
flames of war the spark of something Franklin had not felt for years—or at least not acted on—flickered anew.

Catharine Ray was the daughter of Simon and Deborah Greene Ray of Block Island, in the colony of Rhode Island. Twenty-three years old at the time of Franklin’s visit to Boston at the end of 1754, Katy Ray was staying with her sister Judith, who happened to be married to the stepson of Franklin’s brother John. Franklin met Katy through that familial connection, and was immediately entranced by her beauty and charm. He may have been smitten equally by the mere fact of her youth, and the fact that she appeared quite taken by him.

There was nothing in Franklin’s home life to push him toward a liaison with a woman the same age as his son. By all evidence Debbie suited him as well as ever; indeed he quoted to Katy the song he had composed about Debbie and his acceptance of her faults. Yet on certain days this acceptance must have seemed like resignation, and as his fame and horizons expanded, he must have wondered whether life held more for him. He was not the first traveler to feel the constraints of domesticity lessen with distance from home.

The circumstances of Franklin’s introduction to Katy Ray are uncertain, but at some point it became apparent that he would be heading south for New York and Philadelphia about the same time she would depart in the same direction for her parents’ Block Island home. Likely Franklin suggested they travel together; Judith, feeling responsible for her younger sister, must have been happy to accept this offer of a chaperone. He would accompany Katy as far as Westerly, Rhode Island, where another sister lived. From there he would take the road west to New York, while she would backtrack to where she could catch a boat to Block Island.

Precisely what transpired on that journey through the frozen New England countryside is impossible to re-create with confidence. The only record is found in a handful of letters exchanged between the two in the succeeding several months—and in the relationship that persisted between them for the next thirty years. Katy wrote first, shortly after her safe arrival at her parents’ home. Her letter is lost—doubtless partly because Franklin did not desire it to fall into the hands of Debbie.

He answered with an alacrity commanded by no other correspondent during this busy time of his life. “Your kind letter of January 20 is but just come to hand, and I take this first opportunity of acknowledging the favour,” he wrote. Evidently the two had stretched their journey beyond what was strictly necessary; only with real reluctance had Franklin—who extended his own journey even farther, to accompany her right to the Rhode Island shore—let her go. “I thought too much was hazarded when I saw you put off to sea in that very little skiff, tossed by every wave. But the call was strong and just, a sick parent. I stood on the shore and looked after you, till I could no longer distinguish you, even with my glass.”

Franklin explained how he had tarried in New England, lingering on the road, soaking up memories of his childhood—“my earliest and most pleasant days”—and basking in the recognition that accompanied his recent accomplishments. “I almost forgot I had a home.” New England revivified him; by contrast, when he reached New York he felt “like an old man who, having buried all he loved in this world, begins to think of heaven.”

It was not New England alone that made Franklin feel young; it was Katy Ray. Apparently at some point on their journey he attempted to trade the role of chaperone for one more passionate; she rebuffed him—but with such gentleness and tact as to enamor him of her even more. “I write this during a N. East storm of snow, the greatest we have had this winter. Your favours [those expressed in her letter] come mixed with the snowy fleeces which are as pure as your virgin innocence—and as cold.”

Katy’s rebuff reminded Franklin that he was, by her standards, an old man. His hopes of something more than a kiss on the cheek would remain unrequited; her further favors would be bestowed on one much younger—and unattached. Referring again to that “cold” virgin innocence, he declared, “Let it warm towards some worthy young man, and may Heaven bless you with every kind of happiness.”

Perhaps his hopes revived, perhaps he merely experienced confusion, when she responded with some of that warmth he thought was reserved for another. “Absence rather increases than lessens my affections,” she said.
Franklin’s quartermastering work for Braddock kept him away from home during the spring of 1755; consequently he was slow receiving her letters and responding to them. “My not getting one line from you in answer to 3 of my last letters …” she wrote in June, “gives me a vast deal of uneasiness and occasioned many tears.” Franklin did not save these letters either; this, and Katy’s own remarks in the surviving correspondence, suggest they contained comments inappropriate from a single woman to a married man. “Surely I have wrote too much and you are affronted with me,” she said, “or have not received my letters in which I have said a thousand things that nothing should have tempted me to say to any body else, for I knew they would be safe with you.” She must hear from him. “Tell me you are well and forgive me and love me one-thousandth part so well as I do you.”

Their letters crossed in the mail. “You may write freely everything you think fit, without the least apprehension of any person’s seeing your letters but myself,” he said. “You have complimented me so much in those I have already received that I could not show them without being justly thought a vain coxcomb for doing so.” He teased her for what she denied him. She had asked whether everybody loved him yet; he replied, “I must confess (but don’t you be jealous) that many more people love me now than ever did before. For since I saw you, I have been enabled to do some services to the country and to the army, for which both have thanked and praised me, and say they love me. They
say so,
as you used to do, and if I were to ask any favours of them, would, perhaps, as readily refuse me. So that I find little real advantage in being beloved, but it pleases my humour.”

Real advantage or no from Katy’s love, he urged her to keep sending him letters. “The pleasure I receive from one of yours is more than you can have from two of mine. The small news, the domestic occurrences among our friends, the natural pictures you draw of persons, the sensible observations and reflections you make, and the easy chatty manner in which you express every thing, all contribute to heighten the pleasure; and the more, as they remind me of those hours and miles that we talked away so agreeably, even in a winter journey, a wrong road, and a soaking shower.”

She had spoken of a long thread she spun. He answered, “I wish I had hold of one end of it, to pull you to me.” Yet his wish was merely that, he knew. “You would break it rather than come.”

In the contest
between the Assembly and the proprietors, the proprietors yielded first, but in a manner initially unacceptable to the Assembly.
In November, Governor Morris received word from London that the Penns were pleased to make a “free gift from us to the public” of £5,000, to be used for colonial defense but not to be construed in any way whatsoever as a tax payment or other concession to the unwarranted and irresponsible demands of the Assembly.