The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (65 page)

I looked round for God’s judgments, but saw no signs of them. The cities were well built and full of inhabitants; the markets were filled with plenty; the people well favoured and well clothed; the fields well tilled; the cattle fat and strong; the fences, houses and windows all in repair; and no Old Tenor [paper currency] anywhere in the country; which would almost make one suspect that the Deity is not so angry at that offence as a New England justice.

They arrived
back in London just in time to see the coronation of George III. Franklin had made arrangements for himself and William to watch the procession of the great and good of the empire, the first such event in forty years. As it happened, however, William did not sit with his father but walked in the procession himself.

Precisely how he rated this honor is unclear; hardly more transparent is how William suddenly became one of the king’s favorite, or at least most favored, Americans. In August 1762 the Crown announced the appointment of William Franklin as royal governor of New Jersey.

Deliberate secrecy cloaked the consideration leading to the appointment. One contemporary remarked that the affair was “transacted in so private a manner that not a tittle of it escaped until it was seen in the public papers.” Part of the secrecy reflected the desire of William’s supporters to keep the Penns in the dark lest they mobilize opposition. The
last thing Pennsylvania’s proprietors wanted was the proliferation of Franklins in positions of influence; at a minimum, the bestowal of such an honor on such a young and inexperienced person would be read as approbation of his father. Doubtless more important to the king and his close advisers was the turmoil through which the government was going during this period. The accession of George III, the ascendancy of Bute, the eclipse and resignation of Pitt—all left little room and less stomach for a fight over the governorship of New Jersey.

Not that New Jersey was worth much of a fight. As plums went, it was small and not especially sweet. The job paid little and included few nonsalary emoluments; George’s first choice turned the offer down flat.

But William Franklin was looking for work. He had applied for a post as deputy secretary of Carolina and would have been happy with anything respectable in the Admiralty court or the customs service. He definitely would not say no to a provincial governorship.

Promising as the young man might be, he almost certainly received his appointment because of his connection to his famous father. Through John Pringle, Bute had become acquainted with Franklin. Bute required little insight to recognize Franklin’s gifts, nor to determine that Franklin would make a better friend than an enemy. New Jersey was an inexpensive down payment on Franklin’s goodwill.

William’s appointment inspired him to pursue another goal: matrimony. Some while earlier his eye had fallen on Elizabeth Downes, the daughter of a Barbados planter whose family possessed money but lacked station. William now had station but scant money; the match seemed ideal.

Franklin endorsed both his son’s appointment to governor and his marriage to Betsy Downes. “The lady is of so amiable a character that the latter gives me more pleasure than the former,” he told Jane Mecom, “though I have no doubt but that he will make as good a governor as husband, for he has good principles and good dispositions, and I think is not deficient in good understanding.”

Yet perhaps
he was not quite so delighted as he let on. Franklin did not attend William’s wedding, having departed for America some weeks before. Considering that he had put off and put off again going back to Pennsylvania, one might have expected he could wait a little
longer to see his only son married. But he did not. Nor did he subsequently explain why not.

He may have decided, by the summer of 1762, that if he was ever to go home, he had to go now. Until the moment Franklin’s ship weighed anchor, William Strahan tried to get him to stay—and nearly succeeded. Franklin told Strahan that it required his most resolute efforts to depart, “in opposition to your almost irresistible eloquence, secretly supported by my own treacherous inclinations.” To Lord Kames he wrote from Portsmouth:

I am now waiting here only for a wind to waft me to America, but cannot leave this happy island and my friends in it without extreme regret, though I am going to a country and a people that I love. I am going from the Old World to the new, and I fancy I feel like those who are leaving this world for the next: grief at the parting, fear of the passage, hope of the future.

If Franklin regretted going, still more did his friends and admirers regret his leaving. “I am very sorry that you intend soon to leave our hemisphere,” said David Hume. “America has sent us many good things: gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo &c. But you are the first philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters for whom we are beholden to her. It is our own fault that we have not kept him; whence it appears that we do not agree with Solomon, that wisdom is above gold, for we take care never to send back an ounce of the latter which we once lay our fingers on.”

William Strahan was still more regretful. He sent a letter to David Hall via Franklin, remarking, “This will be brought you by our worthy friend Dr. Franklin, whose face you should never again have seen on your side the water had I been able to prevail upon him to stay, or had my
power
been in any measure equal to my
inclination.”
Strahan’s letter to Hall afforded a glimpse at the man Strahan and many others in England, including Kames and Hume, considered one of the most remarkable personalities of their day.

Though his talents and abilities in almost every branch of human science are singularly great and uncommon, and have added to the pleasure and knowledge of the greatest geniuses of this country, who all admire and love him, and lament his departure, yet he knows as well how to condescend to those of inferior capacity, how to level himself for the time to the understandings of his company, and to enter without affectation into their amusements and chit-chat, that his whole acquaintance here are his affectionate friends.

As for myself, I never found a person in my whole life more thoroughly to my mind. As far as my knowledge or experience or sentiments of every kind could reach his more enlarged sagacity and conceptions, they exactly corresponded with his; or if I accidentally differed from him in any particular, he quickly and with great facility and good nature poured in such light upon the subject as immediately convinced me I was wrong.

Strahan mourned Franklin’s departure as akin to an untimely death and cherished the hope that his friend would soon return to Britain. Yet if fate decreed otherwise, Strahan knew that Franklin would always be “an honour to his country and an ornament to human nature.”

15
Rising in the West
1762–64

Franklin left England as full-blooded a Briton as he had ever been. By his own testimony heintended to return, permanently. He wrote to Strahan just prior to leaving, “I shall probably make but this one vibration and settle here forever. Nothing will prevent it, if I can, as I hope I can, prevail with Mrs. F. to accompany me, especially if we have a peace.”

Franklin’s inquisitive mind craved stimulation, consistently gravitating toward whatever community of intellects asked the most intriguing questions; his expansive temperament sought souls that resonated with his own generosity and sense of virtue. In five years in England he had found more of both than in a lifetime in America. “Of all the enviable things England has,” he told Polly Stevenson, “I envy most its people. Why should that petty island, which compared to America is but like a stepping stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one’s shoes dry; why, I say, should that little island enjoy in almost every neighbourhood more sensible, virtuous and elegant minds than we can collect in ranging 100 leagues of our vast forests?” He left such people reluctantly and, he trusted, temporarily.

The voyage
home—Franklin’s fourth Atlantic passage—was slow but pleasant. The slowness reflected the wartime need to travel in a convoy, which, as convoys do, traveled at the rate of the slowest member. The pleasantness resulted from fair weather, agreeable company, and a delightful three-day stop at Madeira, located on the southern loop to the west, which carried the convoy close to Africa and out of the reach of the Gulf Stream. “It produces not only the fruits of the hot countries, such as oranges, lemons, plantains, bananas, &c. but those of the cold also, as apples, pears and peaches in great perfection,” Franklin recorded. “The mountains are excessively high, and rise suddenly from the town, which affords the inhabitants a singular conveniency, that of getting soon out of its heat after they have done their business, and of ascending to what climate or degree of coolness they are pleased to choose, the sides of the mountains being filled with their country boxes at different heights.” Grapes were in season at the time of Franklin’s visit; he and his shipmates took on numerous bunches, which they hung from the ceiling of the ship’s cabin and plucked for dessert after dinner for weeks afterward.

Franklin may have envied England its people, but he would have been churlish to complain of the welcome he received from the people of Pennsylvania. Rumors had arisen during his last year in England that he had fallen somewhat out of favor with his home folks; foremost of the rumormongers was the Reverend William Smith, recently arrived in London with what he retailed as the latest intelligence from the west. Franklin guessed that Smith was spinning stories, but he could not be sure. Now he was. “I arrived here well on the 1st ultimo,” Franklin told
Richard Jackson at the beginning of December, “and had the pleasure to find all false that Dr. Smith had reported about the diminution of my friends. My house has been filled with a succession of them from morning to night almost ever since I landed to congratulate me on my return; and I never experienced greater cordiality among them.”