The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (56 page)

A few days after his meeting with Granville, Franklin called upon Thomas Penn. The proprietor was civil but evasive. His brother Richard was out of town; until Richard returned, there was nothing Thomas felt free to discuss. Franklin knew full well that for a decade Richard had left the affairs of Pennsylvania to his brother, but he saw little purpose in protest.

When Richard returned, Franklin visited the now-plural proprietors. As Franklin expected, Thomas spoke for their side. “The conversation at first consisted of mutual declarations of disposition to reasonable accommodation,” Franklin remarked, adding, “But I suppose each party had its own ideas of what should be meant by
reasonable.”
This conversation indicated as much. Thomas Penn laid out the prerogatives of the proprietors as he interpreted them; Franklin forwarded the counterclaims of the Assembly. “We now appeared very wide, and so far from each other in our opinions as to discourage all hope of agreement,” Franklin recalled later. Whether Penn was discouraged at the evident impasse, Franklin could not read; the proprietor suggested that Franklin put the position of the Assembly in writing and promised to consider the matter further.

Franklin thereupon repaired to his quarters in Craven Street. Forty-eight hours later he handed the Penns a paper entitled “Heads of Complaint,” identifying the most important of the difficulties between the
Assembly and the proprietors. The first was the unreasonable restraints placed upon the Penns’ appointee as governor (deputy governor to be precise; Thomas Penn himself was technically governor). Of late, Governor Morris had been replaced by Governor William Denny, a man who seemed reasonable enough but, like his predecessor, was bound by instructions that left no room for his own judgment. The result, in Franklin’s words, was “great injury of His Majesty’s service in time of war, and danger of the loss of the Colony.”

The second complaint followed from the first, to wit, that the restrictions placed upon the governor infringed the right of the Assembly to raise supplies essential for the defense of the country. Indeed, the proprietors extorted assent from the Assembly to unwise and unconstitutional measures, under duress of emergency. “The Assembly, in time of war, are reduced to the necessity of either losing the country to the enemy, or giving up the liberties of the people and receiving law from the Proprietary.”

Franklin’s third and final complaint identified the most onerous of these extortions, specifically the exemption of the vast proprietary estates from taxation. The proprietors expected the people to defend proprietary property but refused to contribute their fair share. “This, to the Assembly and People of Pennsylvania, appears both unjust and cruel.”

Franklin concluded his précis of grievance with a request that the proprietors consider the complaints and redress them in the “most speedy and effectual manner, that harmony may be restored between the several branches of the legislature, and the public service be hereafter readily and fully provided for.”

Almost
immediately upon delivering his list to the Penns, Franklin fell sick. What at first seemed a cold ramified into the second noteworthy illness of Franklin’s life, lasting two months. The cold symptoms subsided after several days but were replaced by those of some secondary infection, including a high fever and “great pain in my head, the top of which was very hot, and when the pain went off, very sore and tender.” The bouts of pain persisted for twelve to thirty-six hours at a time, accompanied by occasional delirium. A physician bled Franklin from the back of the head, which relieved the pain temporarily. The doctor also prescribed a medicinal bark, administered both ground and brewed into a tea. “I took so much bark in various ways,” Franklin informed Debbie, “that I began to abhor it.” An emetic was recommended, which Franklin
at first resisted from fear it would exacerbate his headache. Eventually he achieved equivalent results on his own. “I was seized one morning with a vomiting and purging, the latter of which continued the greater part of the day, and I believe was a kind of crisis to the distemper, carrying it clear off, for ever since I feel quite lightsome, and am every day gathering strength.”

During
his time of suffering the patient took some comfort from the belief that the proprietors were preparing their response to his catalog of complaints. In fact they were doing no such thing. Rather they were commencing a campaign of psychological attrition. They received Franklin’s paper and simply held it, evidently convinced that either the emergency in Pennsylvania would pass or Franklin would weary of delay and go home.

The Penns’ strategy followed the advice of their lawyer, an expert in the art of glacial litigation. Ferdinand John Paris had been counseling the proprietors since before Franklin’s first visit to London; for most of that time he had charge of the Penns’ endless (thus far) border dispute with Lord Baltimore of Maryland (which, after Paris’s death diminished his obstructional abilities, ultimately yielded to the survey of Messrs. Mason and Dixon). Yet Paris was not simply patient; he was also nasty. Thomas Hutchinson considered him a solicitor of the “first rate,” but one who possessed “a peculiar talent at slurring the characters of his antagonists.”

Paris probably did not need any encouragement toward antipathy to Franklin; as the Penns’ agent he considered it part of his job. (For a time Paris had been the Pennsylvania Assembly’s agent, but the Assembly severed the relationship on discovering his preference for the Penns over the Pennsylvanians.) Whether or not he required the encouragement, he received it from Franklin’s Philadelphia foe, former governor Morris. “Mr. Franklin will be in England exhibiting his complaints against the proprietors, as is thought and expected by many that sent him,” Morris warned. “But I imagine his own schemes are very different from those of his employers [that is, the Assembly]. He is a sensible, artful man, very knowing in American affairs, and was his heart as sound as his head, few men would be fitter for public trust. But that is far from being the case. He has nothing in view but to serve himself, and however he may give another turn to what he says and does, yet you may be assured that is at the bottom and in the end will shew itself.”

Franklin knew of Paris, and knew Paris knew of him. “He was a proud angry man, and as I had occasionally in the answers of the Assembly treated his papers with some severity, they being really weak in point of argument and haughty in expression, he had conceived a mortal enmity to me.” Franklin did not improve Paris’s opinion by refusing to meet with him, insisting instead on dealing with the proprietors directly or not at all.

Only gradually did Franklin realize that this attitude played into Paris’s hands. The proprietors found one excuse after another for not being able to meet Franklin, leaving him no one to talk to. The months passed, and Pennsylvania’s problems were no closer to being solved.

Yet Franklin
was not without resources. Prevented from making his case to the proprietors, he argued it before the court of public opinion. During the late summer and autumn of 1757 London papers carried letters motivated, if not paid for, by the Penns, criticizing the Pennsylvanians for using their differences with the proprietors as an excuse not to defend themselves. Franklin denied the allegation directly, even as he employed it as an excuse to launch a broader campaign in the press against the proprietors.

In September
The Citizen
carried a long letter over the signature of William Franklin. William doubtless contributed to the letter; indeed he boasted of his role in the composition, at the same time explaining the logic: “For although it might not be so proper for my father to take notice of these aspersions, while the negotiation was on foot, there could be no reason why I, as an inhabitant of Pennsylvania, now on my travels in England, no ways concerned in conducting the negotiation, should not vindicate the honour and reputation of my country when I saw it so injuriously attacked.” Yet quite clearly the inspiration behind the letter and the language in which it was written were Franklin’s. The disguise almost certainly failed to fool Paris or the Penns, but they were not the audience. Whether or not ordinary readers, who
were
the audience, were fooled, Franklin preferred this thin disguise to none at all.

The essentials of Franklin’s argument here differed little from those he had made in Pennsylvania and in letters to the governor and recently to the proprietors themselves; yet, appealing to his readers, he emphasized the consonance of interests between the people of Pennsylvania and the people of England. The proprietors had attempted to abrogate “the privileges long enjoyed by the people, and which they think they
have a right to, not only as Pennsylvanians, but as Englishmen.” Employing the famous formula of John Locke, Franklin expressed astonishment that during wartime, “when the utmost unanimity and dispatch is necessary to the preservation of life, liberty, and estate,” the Penns should send a governor to America with instructions “as must inevitably produce endless dispute and delay, and prevent the assembly from effectually opposing the French upon any other condition than the giving up their rights as Englishmen.”

Franklin’s letter was reprinted from
The Citizen
to the
London Chronicle,
then repeated in
The Citizen
and picked up by the
Gentleman’s Magazine.
At Franklin’s urging it was subsequently included as an appendix in a book,
An Historical Review of the Constitution and Government of Pennsylvania.

By the evidence of this editorial interest, Franklin’s appeal to the rights of Englishmen touched a sympathetic chord. When
The Citizen
ran the letter the second time, the editors cited popular demand and asserted that the journal stood ready to defend the people “by exposing the artifices of those who would, in a remote land, overthrow the native rights and liberties of Englishmen.”

Franklin
relished a good fight in the press, but no more than he appreciated an ingenious experiment. His growing circle of friends included several whose tastes in science matched his own. John Pringle, a member of the Royal Society and the Honest Whigs, was a Scottish doctor well versed in contagious diseases and the sorts of infirmities encountered by soldiers in the field; he also dabbled in the use of electricity to alleviate paralysis. Franklin, upon hearing Pringle inform the Royal Society of recent discoveries in this last area, shared findings of his own, based on work he had done some years earlier in Pennsylvania. The patients had presented themselves to him, Franklin said, following reports in the papers of electrical cures in Europe. He had wired them to his electrical jars and sent shocks through the palsied limbs.