The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (89 page)

Better—but still not good. In November 1772 Franklin presented Dartmouth a petition from Massachusetts complaining at the Crown’s paying the salary of the Massachusetts governor. A few days later Dartmouth summoned Franklin to discuss the matter. In tones Franklin found reasonable and ultimately persuasive, the secretary of state explained that the present was a poor season for forwarding such a petition. The king would be offended. He might turn it over to his lawyers; if he did, they would deliver an adverse opinion. If he handed it to Parliament, that body almost certainly would censure the province—which in turn would produce more unrest there. Dartmouth professed great goodwill for New England and said he did not wish the first act of his administration to be one that led to unavoidable dissatisfaction there. When Franklin interjected that it would be a dangerous thing for the government to deny the people the right of petition, Dartmouth responded that Franklin misunderstood. As a government minister he was not refusing the Massachusetts petition, and if Franklin insisted, he would receive it. But as a friend of America he hoped Franklin would reconsider whether he really wished to insist just now. Perhaps he could consult once more with the Massachusetts House. After all, since the petition was initially ordered, there had been a change in the administration in London. The responsible thing would be to confirm that the Massachusetts body still desired to go forward.

“Upon the whole I thought it best not to disoblige him in the beginning of his administration,” Franklin told Thomas Cushing, by way of explaining why in fact he was not going forward at once with the petition. The House ought to reconsider the matter and re-advise. “If after
deliberation they should send me fresh orders, I shall immediately obey them.” The petition might well gain weight from the mere reconsideration. Sounding somewhat unsure of himself, Franklin added, “I hope my conduct will not be disapproved.”

Franklin’s
uncertainty probably reflected an understanding that his conduct
would
be disapproved, at least by such skeptics as Sam Adams and James Otis. From the start they had suspected him of being too easy on the ministry, and here he was meekly following Dartmouth’s lead. Quite likely a desire to show he was no minister’s tool contributed to the most fateful misstep of his career—fateful for both himself and the British empire.

“There has lately fallen into my hands part of a correspondence that I have reason to believe laid the foundation of most if not all our present grievances.” This was Franklin writing to Cushing, in the same letter breaking the news that he was delaying the petition. Franklin declined to say
how
the correspondence fell into his hands, and in fact he never did say, to Cushing or to anyone else who recorded the information for posterity. The pilferage of mail was hardly unheard of; Franklin had some reason to think his own letters to America were being opened. One might have guessed that his many years as postmaster would have inspired a deep respect for the confidentiality of the mails; on the other hand, as Poor Richard and any number of other aphorists knew, familiarity breeds contempt. Moreover, the pragmatist in Franklin was never one to set airy principle above practical effect; if a peek beneath someone else’s seal could effect a reconciliation between the colonies and Britain, the sin would be venial and easily forgiven.

The correspondence in question consisted of several letters by various authors written between 1767 and 1769. The most important authors were Thomas Hutchinson and his brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver. The offices of the two men—Massachusetts governor and lieutenant governor, respectively—were what gave the letters such interest, for the opinions expressed were no more inflammatory than many others emanating from Massachusetts at this time, and the authors’ views on constitutional relations between that colony and Britain paralleled the conventional wisdom of officials of the British government—among whom, of course, they numbered themselves. Yet at the same time they spoke as Massachusetts men, which of course they also were and were so
understood in England to be. This was what galled Franklin, and doubtless what moved him to forward the letters to Cushing.

The gist of the letters was that the troubles in America reflected no broad disaffection but simply the political perversions of a minority. The most damning passage—damning in the eyes of American patriots—was one written by Hutchinson in January 1769 outlining the measures he judged necessary to restore order and respect for government in Massachusetts.

There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties. I relieve myself by considering that in a remove from the state of nature to the most perfect state of government there must be a great restraint of natural liberty. I doubt whether it is possible to project a system of government in which a colony 3000 miles distant from the parent state shall enjoy all the liberty of the parent state. I am certain I have never yet seen the projection. I wish the good of the colony when I wish to see some further restraint of liberty rather than the connexion with the parent state should be broken; for I am sure such a breach must prove the ruin of the colony.

In forwarding the letters to Cushing, Franklin still sought reconciliation. He hoped to show that the oppressive policies lately pursued by the British government were the result of evil counsel from an identifiable source—namely Hutchinson and Oliver—and not the consequence of a general conspiracy in England against American liberty. The malicious influence of the two men could be countered and neutralized, and the situation corrected.

Franklin understood the delicacy of what he was doing, and when he passed the correspondence to Cushing, he included a proviso: “I have engaged that it shall not be printed, nor any copies taken of the whole or any part of it; but I am allowed and desired to let it be seen by some men of worth in the province for their satisfaction only.” He expected the letters back after “some months in your possession”; presumably he would return them to his source.

Franklin did not deal in stolen goods without compunction. But Hutchinson and Oliver had crossed the line. For years they had been “bartering away the liberties of their native country for posts”—it was not lost on Franklin, nor did he want it lost on Cushing and the others in Massachusetts, that Hutchinson and Oliver had gained their present
positions
after
these letters reached Britain. As part of the bargain the two received increases in their salaries and pensions, “for which the money is to be squeezed from the people.” The people naturally resisted; to suppress the resistance, and preserve their ill-gotten gains, Hutchinson and Oliver summoned British troops, conjuring “imaginary rebellions” and “exciting jealousies in the Crown, and provoking it to wrath against a great part of its faithful subjects.” In sum, the malign pair had shown themselves “mere time-servers, seeking their own private emolument through any quantity of public mischief; betrayers of the interest, not of their native country only, but of the Government they pretend to serve, and of whole English Empire.”

So angry was Franklin that he wanted the world to know of the duplicity of the governor and lieutenant governor. “I therefore wish I was at liberty to make the letters public.” But his source insisted he not. “I can only allow them to be seen by yourself,” he told Cushing, “by the other gentlemen of the Committee of Correspondence, by Messrs. Bowdoin and Pitts, of the Council, and Drs. Chauncey, Cooper and Winthrop, with a few such other gentlemen as you may think fit to show them to.”

Franklin was no innocent in the political arts. He understood how valuable the letters of Hutchinson and Oliver would be to their many opponents in the Massachusetts House, a group that included those Franklin named. He must have expected that the letters would find the light of New England day even if his own promise precluded their publication in old England. By his own statement, he would have published them himself had he been free. Indeed, Cushing might easily have read Franklin’s statement as implicit permission to publish.

Apparently Cushing did not, for the speaker treated the letters circumspectly. Others, however, felt less constrained. It may have been John Hancock who laid the letters before the House; it certainly was Sam Adams who read them to the members. Shortly thereafter the House ordered the letters printed for members’ use. Soon they were available in pamphlet form and in installments in the
Massachusetts Spy.
Copies quickly found their way all over the colony.

In Franklin’s
correspondence and apparently in his feelings during this period occurred a curious reversion. The boy who at seventeen had eagerly shaken the dust of Boston from his shoes found himself at
sixty-seven reidentifying with the city of his birth. Had Franklin reflected on the matter he might have detected an underlying consistency, for the rebel who left Boston for its being too conservative now returned to Boston when the city itself grew rebellious. For the first twenty years of his political life Franklin had fought the powers that be in Pennsylvania; now that the contest with Parliament had superseded the struggle with the Penns, he transferred his emotional loyalties to the liveliest fight going, between Boston and London.

Yet Philadelphia continued to exercise a hold. Various people and events recalled what tied him to his adopted city. In late 1771 Franklin finally met Richard Bache, who was visiting his parents at Preston. Bache experienced more than the usual trepidation of the son-in-law upon encountering his wife’s father, for the father in this case was not merely a world-famous figure but also a stern sire who had left no doubt as to his opposition to the marriage. Yet Debbie had been working on Franklin, as had Mrs. Stevenson and Polly (now Polly Stevenson Hewson). They might have suggested, or Bache perhaps reckoned on his own, that he would make his best appearance among friends and family; from this followed an invitation to Franklin during his northern tour to stop at the Bache family home in Yorkshire. Richard Bache joined them there.

His sigh of relief was audible clear back to Philadelphia. “I can now, with great satisfaction, tell you that he received me with open arms and with a degree of affection that I did not expect to be made sensible of at our first meeting,” Bache wrote Debbie.

The younger man accompanied the elder on the return to London. During the journey Franklin grew to like Bache. “His behaviour here has been very agreeable to me,” Franklin told Debbie. He also gave Bache some advice, which he—Franklin—shared with Sally in a letter. “I advised him to settle down to business in Philadelphia where he will always be close to you.” This might have seemed odd coming from a husband who had spent less than two years of the last fifteen on the same continent with his own wife, but perhaps no odder than an additional pearl—from the king’s postmaster of thirty-five years—about eschewing public office. “I am of opinion that almost any profession a man has been educated in is preferable to an office held at pleasure, as rendering him more independent, more a freeman less subject to the caprices of superiors.” In this letter he urged Sally and her husband to be industrious and frugal; that way whatever he and Debbie bequeathed them “may be a pretty addition, though of itself far from sufficient to maintain and bring up a
family.” As a foretaste, however, of that pretty addition, and perhaps recalling how peace treaties with the Indians were always sealed with gifts, he told Sally he had given Bache £200, “with which I wish you good luck.”

If Bache’s visit reminded Franklin of home, so did his encounters with his godson, Polly Hewson’s little boy William. Franklin had never seen Sally’s son Benjamin Franklin Bache, now nearly four years old; what he knew he got by letter from her and her mother. His imagination supplied the rest as he watched Billy Hewson grow. “In return for your history of your
Grandson,”
he wrote Debbie, “I must give you a little of the history of my
Godson.
He is now 21 months old, very strong and healthy, begins to speak a little, and even to sing. He was with us a few days last week, grew fond of me, and would not be contented to sit down to breakfast without coming to call
Pa,
rejoicing when he had got me into my place…. It makes me long to be at home to play with Ben.”