The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (83 page)

Both the land scheme and the possibility of an appointment depended on the larger and overriding issue of the day—overriding at least for a colonial agent. The elections in England had temporarily eclipsed the question of the nature and fate of relations between the American colonies and the motherland. But the new Parliament would soon be sitting, and it would certainly take up the colonial question.

As before, Franklin did what he could to influence Parliament’s thinking. He wrote letters to London papers urging conciliation and warning against the opposite. In one such letter he recalled the revolt of the United Provinces of the Netherlands against Spanish rule, a conflict
that lasted eighty years and ruined the Spanish empire. British soldiers might justly judge themselves braver and more competent than their Spanish counterparts, Franklin conceded (again anonymously), but a war against America would place them in unusually unfavorable circumstances. “It is well known that America is a country full of forests, mountains, &c. That in such a country a small irregular force can give abundance of trouble to a regular one that is much greater.” In the late war against France, Canada held out for five years against 25,000 British regulars and a like number of American troops. Canada, now British, was far from the strongest of the fifteen American colonies; a war against all fifteen, with those colonial troops now in opposition, would take—by Franklin’s half-spurious, half-serious arithmetic—fifteen times as long, or seventy-five years.

In another published piece he vigorously disavowed an intention often imputed to the Americans: to gain independence. “Allow me to tell you that you are
certainly
mistaken,” he replied to a journal’s letter-writer who had described the colonies as harboring advocates of independence, “and that there is not a single wish in the colonies to be free from subjection to their amiable sovereign, the King of Great Britain.” This contribution was only slightly pseudonymous, as anyone who thought twice about the name of the author, “Francis Lynn,” might have recognized.

In another instance he posed as a Frenchman. France was in the process of subduing a rebellion in Corsica and was coming under considerable criticism in England for doing so. “You English consider us French as enemies to liberty,” Franklin covertly wrote. “How easy it is for men to see the faults of others while blind to their own.” Corsicans had never enriched France by their labor and commerce, had never fought side by side with Frenchmen in war, had never loved and honored France, were not the very children of France. “But all this your American colonists have been and are to you! Yet at this very moment, while you are abusing us for attempting to reduce the Corsicans, you yourselves are about to make slaves of a much greater number of those British Americans.” What did the British know about liberty? “All the liberty you seem to value is the liberty of abusing your superiors, and of tyrannizing over those below you.”

Franklin supplemented his public—if often disguised—campaign with private letters devoted to preventing the situation in America from escalating beyond control. Boston seemed the likeliest location of trouble. In October 1768, British troops had been landed at Boston to suppress incipient sedition, which Governor Francis Bernard detected in the
Massachusetts assembly, in the streets of the city, and in the writings of Samuel Adams and others. Franklin feared the worst. “I am under continued apprehensions that we may have bad news from America,” he wrote to George Whitefield. “The sending soldiers to Boston always appeared to me a dangerous step; they could do no good, they might occasion mischief.” The colonists considered themselves injured and oppressed; the soldiers were as insolent as young men under arms usually were. “I cannot but fear the consequences of bringing them together. It seems like setting up a smith’s forge in a magazine of gunpowder.”

(In this letter to the great evangelist, Franklin continued their theological debate of thirty years. “I
see
with you that our affairs are not well managed by our rulers here below; I wish I could
believe
with you that they are well attended to by those above.” But he could not. “I rather suspect, from certain circumstances, that though the general government of the universe is well administered, our particular little affairs are perhaps below notice, and left to take the chance of human prudence or imprudence, as either may happen to be uppermost.”)

After the new Parliament met and failed to repeal the Townshend acts, refusing even to entertain American petitions against them, Franklin wrote to friends in Boston, pleading patience. From his youth he knew the sort of roughnecks who roamed from the North End to the South End and back; they must not be given their heads. Rather Boston—and the other colonies—should stick to their peaceful nonimportation agreements as the antidote to the Townshend acts. Parliament appeared fixed in its determination not to repeal the acts. “I hope my country-folks will remain as fixed in their resolutions of industry and frugality till those acts are repealed,” Franklin wrote Samuel Cooper, a Boston minister who subsequently circulated Franklin’s views. Parliament underestimated the Americans, Franklin said. “They flatter themselves that you cannot long subsist without their manufactures; they believe that you have not virtue enough to persist in such agreements; they imagine the colonies will differ among themselves, deceive and desert one another, and quietly one after the other submit to the yoke and return to the use of British fineries.” Franklin said he had told his British acquaintances otherwise; he hoped his American friends would not prove him wrong.

Franklin laid the blame directly, and exclusively, at the door of Parliament. The people of Britain were not at fault, being of “a noble and generous nature.” “We have many, very many friends among them,” Franklin told Cooper. Still less was King George responsible for America’s woes. “I can scarcely conceive a King of better disposition, of more exemplary
virtues, or more truly desirous of promoting the welfare of all his subjects.” Parliament was quite another matter. “Though I might excuse that which made the acts [that is, the previous Parliament] as being surprised and misled into the measure, I know not how to excuse this, which under the fullest conviction of its being a wrong one, resolves to continue it.” Even American opponents of the Townshend acts diplomatically referred to the “wisdom and justice” of Parliament; Franklin remarked, “If this new Parliament had really been
wise
it would not have refused even to read a petition against the Acts; and if it had been
just
it would have repealed them and refunded the money.”

Nor could Franklin honestly hope for much better. Though sentiment existed in Parliament for repeal—out of mercantile self-interest, as after the Stamp Act, rather than any love for the Americans—the government could not muster the will or energy to move. On this point Franklin had to agree with Grenville, who from the opposite vantage point likened the present ministry to two inexperienced sailors. The pair found themselves up in the round top, knowing nothing of what they were supposed to be about, so they simply pretended to keep busy. “What are you doing there, Jack?” cried the boatswain (in Franklin’s retelling of Grenville’s story). “Nothing,” replied Jack. “And, pray, what are you about, Tom?” the boatswain asked the other. “I,” answered Tom, “am helping him.”

With such in charge, the future was clouded at best. “It is very uncertain as yet what turn American affairs will take here,” Franklin told William in October 1769. “The friends of both countries wish a reconciliation; the enemies of either endeavour to widen the breach. God knows how it will end.”

19
The Rift Widens
1770–71

In March 1770 the spark from the forge Franklin had spoken of hit the gunpowder of the magazine.

Boston’s winter had everyone in the city on edge. The cold white blanket that covered the streets and the Common had long lost the charm of first snowfall; the icicles that hung from each eave and had once seemed picturesque now simply threatened the crania of passersby. Yet such was true every winter; what made this winter worse was that to the insults of nature were added those of Parliament. Boston was a town under siege. British soldiers patrolled the streets; British warships were anchored in the harbor. The soldiers had little to do, and less money to do it with; to supplement both deficiencies they sought casual work.

This annoyed unskilled Bostonians who themselves wanted work and needed it more than the soldiers did. Both groups were young, male, physically inclined, and prone to spend what little cash they did command drinking rum in the town’s taverns. To some, brawling was the intended climax of an evening out; to others simply a satisfactory alternative when loose women were in short supply—as they usually were to men short of money.

Had the young bucks been left to themselves, the brawling might have produced broken heads, the odd bitten ear, and little more, but upon their rowdy shoulders was placed the burden of the escalating imperial conflict. The most vocal elements of Boston’s popular political class—Sam Adams, James Otis, and the Sons of Liberty—seized every opportunity to attack the Parliament that had sent the young men in red uniforms to keep such as Adams, Otis, and the Sons in line. Boston papers related, and in some cases created, lurid stories of insults and atrocities inflicted upon the innocent people of the city by the mercenaries camped in their midst. Townsmen tried to sap said mercenaries’ morale by enticing them to desertion, which the British officers combated by floggings and, in one exemplary instance, execution.

The tension turned Boston upon itself. A merchant accused of violating the nonimportation pact was branded an enemy of the people; a shouting crowd of young men and boys put up a sign—
IMPORTER—
outside his shop. A neighbor, Ebenezer Richardson, came to his friend’s defense and tore down the sign. The crowd turned on Richardson, who himself labored under the radicals’ suspicion (one of them called him “the most abandoned wretch in America”). Richardson was cornered in his house; a radical challenged him, above the tumult: “Come out, you damn son of a bitch. I’ll have your heart out, your liver out!” Rocks through Richardson’s windows punctuated the challenge.

Richardson had seen what happened to Thomas Hutchinson’s house, and though his was hardly so elegant, it was home, and he aimed to defend it. He emerged with a shotgun; when the crowd continued to taunt and threaten, he unleashed a load of swan shot. A boy of eleven named Christopher Seider was killed by the discharge; another lad was wounded. This sobered some in the crowd but inflamed others; while Richardson paused to reload, the latter group engulfed him and might well have torn him limb from limb had not one of their number, a well known Son of Liberty, insisted that he receive a trial before being executed.

Richardson was a Bostonian, not a British soldier, but the killing of
the Seider boy was blamed upon the British policies the soldiers represented. And the boy’s funeral became an occasion for display of popular fury at the condition of servitude to which Parliament appeared bent on subjecting Boston. For the next two weeks tempers in the taverns and on the streets grew shorter. A patriot ropemaker provoked a fight by asking a soldier if he wanted work; when the soldier said he did, the hemp man told him what he might do: “Clean my shithouse.”

On the night of March 5 a feisty apprentice mocked a British officer on King Street. A British private named Hugh White, who happened to be standing nearby, struck the apprentice for his insolence. The young man shouted for help, which appeared as if from nowhere. In the middle distance, church bells began ringing, as they did for a fire. Hundreds of men and women answered the call—but suspiciously armed. “It is very odd to come to put out a fire with sticks and bludgeons,” an observer remarked.

As the crowd surged, the captain of the British guard mobilized his men to rescue Private White. Muskets at the ready, with bayonets fixed, the small company thrust its way through the shouting throng to White. But the crowd closed in behind, and instead of one hostage it now held nine. Curses, oaths, snowballs, and chunks of jagged ice rained down upon the soldiers; in the semi-glow of moonlight (Boston’s byways lacked streetlamps) the soldiers credibly feared for their lives. The crowd bayed for blood—at times not seeming to care whose. “Damn you, you sons of bitches, fire!” taunted one radical. “You can’t kill us all!”