The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (79 page)

Although the American response lacked the violence of the Stamp Act period, it convinced many in England of the Americans’ fundamental bad faith. The Townshend duties, in this view, were a generous effort by Parliament to keep peace within the empire; the American call for nonimportation was therefore an insult and an outrage. The London journals throbbed with denunciations of the rebellious ingrates across the water; demands that they be brought to heel rang through the taverns and clubs of the city.

Franklin again found himself in a difficult position. As during the Stamp Act crisis, many in America suspected him of toadying to Parliament. By his own words, had he not brought on these new duties? At the same time, many in England considered him a sly deceiver. Had he not said the Americans accepted the idea of external taxes? Why were they then rejecting these external taxes?

Out of self-defense as much as the defense of American interests, Franklin felt obliged to respond. Characteristically, he called for calm. “Instead of raving (with your correspondent of yesterday) against the Americans as ‘diggers of pits for this country,’ ‘lunatics,’ ‘sworn enemies,’ ‘false,’ ‘ungrateful,’ ‘cut-throats,’ &c. which is a treatment of customers that I doubt is not like to bring them back to our shop,” he wrote to the editor of the London
Gazetteer,
“I would recommend to all writers on American affairs (however
hard
their
arguments
may be)
soft words,
civility, and good manners.” The current differences with the colonies were not fatal, and might be bridged by reason and fairness. Intemperate words would only aggravate matters. “Railing and reviling can answer no good end; it may make the breach wider; it can never heal it.” The raver Franklin referred to had adopted the name “Old England”: Franklin signed himself “Old England in its Senses.”

A more thorough piece appeared in the
London Chronicle.
“The waves never rise but when the winds blow,” he quoted the proverb and himself, before essaying to smooth the waters by diminishing the gale. The source of the trouble, he said, was a basic misunderstanding; a recounting of the distant and recent past by “an impartial historian of American facts and opinions” would set things straight. Again writing anonymously, he explained that the colonies’ traditional method of contributing to imperial upkeep was by grants, supplied in response to royal requisition. This method “left the King’s subjects in those remote countries the pleasure of showing their zeal and loyalty, and of imagining that they recommended themselves to their Sovereign by the liberality of their voluntary grants.” This practice, and the opinions it entailed, conformed to the
Americans’ belief that their rights as Englishmen forbade their taxation by any assembly not of their choosing.

All was well, he continued, until an unnamed (but easily identified) minister determined to levy a stamp tax upon the Americans. The Americans naturally resented this imposition and resisted it, till Parliament wisely rescinded it. The rescission put the Americans in “high good humour,” but the ousted ministers in England who had designed the Stamp Act were resentful and eager for revenge. The objection of New York to quartering the king’s troops afforded a pretext for suspending the assembly there. This greatly alarmed all the people of America, who inferred that what was done to New York might be done to them.

Their alarm intensified from the concurrent introduction of a new set of taxes. The taxes themselves were less odious than the purposes for which they were designed, namely, to support governors, judges, and other royal officials, thereby freeing those officials from any dependence on the provinces in which they served. This was the critical point. The governors, judges, and the rest had no permanent interest in the colonies, typically being sent out from England for a few years, to return to England at the end of their service. Should they be relieved of even the necessity of looking to the provincial assemblies for their pay, there would be no influencing them in the least. Governors might well take to ignoring the assemblies entirely, perhaps not even calling them. “Thus the people will be deprived of their most essential rights.”

The colonists had other complaints. At the insistence of a handful of self-interested British merchants, they had been deprived of the right to issue paper currency of their own. Equally selfish parties benefited from prohibitions against the Americans’ producing nails, steel—even hats. “It is of no importance to the common welfare of the empire, whether a subject of the King’s gets his living by hats on this side or that side of the water. Yet the hatters of England have prevailed to obtain an act in their own favour, restraining that manufacture in America, in order to oblige the Americans to send their beavers to England to be manufactured, and purchase back the hats, loaded with the charges of a double transportation.” No less galling was the long-standing practice of allowing the prisons of Britain to dump their human refuse upon American shores. For decades England had been availing itself of this opportunity to export its rogues and villains; just recently Scotland won this dubious distinction.

How were the Americans to respond? Could they conclude other than to look out for themselves by the only means in their power? Contravening no law, they simply decided not to import goods from Britain,
the better to conserve the gold and silver they needed as currency, to avoid the taxes they had no part in designing, to lighten the burden British monopolies regularly exacted from them, to prepare for the day when a reenlightened Parliament and Crown would constitutionally
request
support rather than unconstitutionally
extort
it. “For notwithstanding the reproaches thrown out against us in their public papers and pamphlets, notwithstanding we have been reviled in the senate as
rebels
and
traitors,
we are truly a loyal people. Scotland has had its rebellions, and England its plots against the present royal family; but America is untainted with those crimes; there is in it scarce a man, there is not a single native of our country, who is not firmly attached to his King by principle and by affection.”

But something novel was expected: a loyalty to Parliament, a loyalty that extended to surrender of all Americans’ property to a body in which there sat not a single member of America’s choosing. This was not merely novel; it was unconstitutional, and it threatened mortal harm to the empire. “We were separated too far from Britain by the Ocean, but we were united to it by respect and love, so that we could at any time freely have spent our lives and little fortunes in its cause. But this unhappy new system of politics tends to dissolve those bands of union, and to sever us for ever.”

The anonymous Franklin, posing as a devoted supporter of Parliament, disowned these views for himself. “No reasonable man in England can approve of such sentiments.” They were, rather, “the wild ravings of the at present half distracted Americans.” Yet British self-interest required taking them into account. “I sincerely wish, for the sake of the manufactures and commerce of Great Britain, and for the sake of the strength which a firm union with our growing colonies would give us, that these people had never been thus needlessly driven out of their senses.”

Franklin’s
distancing himself from the views of the American malcontents was a tactic of propaganda, aimed to avoid throwing his readers on the defensive. But it was also an indication of an honest ambivalence. Even while writing regularly on relations between the British government and the American colonies, he was unsure quite what those relations were or ought to be.

To his surprise, he received an education in the matter from a man he had until lately vehemently opposed. John Dickinson was a
near-contemporary of William Franklin, and for a time their career paths ran parallel. Dickinson read law in Philadelphia at about the same time William did; he finished his legal education at London’s Middle Temple just before William. Both went into politics after a brief legal practice; each became a solid supporter of the status quo.

But where William’s appointment as royal governor of New Jersey placed him in league with Franklin, Dickinson’s election to the Pennsylvania Assembly put him opposite Franklin, for the status quo Dickinson supported was that of the province’s proprietary government. That Dickinson was an ardent advocate and facile writer merely made him, in Franklin’s opinion, the more dangerous. Consequently it was with some surprise that Franklin read a series of articles published by Dickinson in the
Pennsylvania Chronicle
starting in the winter of 1767–68, articles that comprised the most astute and incisive argument in print on the subject of relations between Britain and the American colonies.

Actually, the surprise came after the fact, for the “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” were published, like most of Franklin’s own pieces during this period, anonymously. Lord Hillsborough initially guessed that Franklin himself was the author. “My Lord H. mentioned the Farmer’s letters to me,” Franklin wrote William, “said he had read them, that they were well written, and he believed he could guess who was the author, looking in my face at the same time as if he thought it was me.” Franklin did not know who the author was, and did not discover Dickinson’s identity until some months later. By then he had arranged the republication of the “Letters” as a pamphlet in London, to which he appended an appreciative preface.

Dickinson’s letters denied the central argument Franklin had made in his testimony before Parliament, and again when writing as Benevolus: that a meaningful distinction existed between internal and external taxes. This was the wrong way to slice the taxing issue, Dickinson said. The distinction that mattered was between taxes designed for revenue and those designed for regulation. The latter were unavoidable in a mercantile empire and were constitutionally innocuous. The former, even if devised as external taxes upon imports, were illegitimate and insidious when levied, as the Townshend taxes were, without the consent of those required to pay them.

Dickinson’s letters provided the theoretical justification for colonial opposition to the Townshend acts. Most colonists had concluded that the acts were mischievous or worse, but they had struggled to find constitutional
grounds for this conclusion. Dickinson discovered what they were looking for.

Franklin thought so, although he was fairly certain the Farmer would not have the last word. The problem, Franklin told William, was that even Dickinson’s distinction was philosophically suspect. Dickinson allowed Parliament the power to regulate the trade of the colonies but withheld the right to tax trade for revenue. Where did one draw the line between regulation and revenue? Was a sugar tax of one penny a tariff for regulation and a sugar tax of two pence a tariff for revenue? More important than where the line lay, who would draw it? “If Parliament is to be the judge, it seems to me that establishing such principles of distinction will amount to little.”

The fundamental problem was that any effort to subdivide sovereignty was almost certainly doomed to fail. Either Parliament was sovereign over the American colonies or it was not.

The more I have thought and read on the subject the more I find myself confirmed in my opinion that no middle doctrine can be well maintained, I mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might be made of either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to make
all laws
for us, or that it has a power to make
no laws
for us.

At this moment, in March 1768, Franklin reached what seemed the Rubicon of relations between Britain and the American colonies. Either Parliament was supreme in all areas pertaining to the provinces or it was supreme in none. “I think the arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those for the former,” he told William.

Typically, however, Franklin declined to be dogmatic on this point, nor on the conclusions to which it logically led. If Parliament was supreme in nothing touching the colonies, then the colonies were perfectly justified—in theory—in resisting every effort by Parliament to legislate for them in any manner whatsoever. “Supposing that doctrine established, the colonies would then be so many separate states, only subject to the same King, as England and Scotland were before the Union.” Whether a union like that between England and Scotland should be effected between the American colonies and England would be a matter for Americans and English to decide. Franklin, still the British imperialist, favored a transatlantic union. “Though particular parts might find
particular disadvantages in it, they would find greater advantages in the security arising to every part from the increased strength of the whole.” He realized, however, that the moment was not propitious. “Such union is not likely to take place while the nature of our present relation is so little understood on both sides the water, and sentiments concerning it remain so widely different.”