The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (91 page)

The entire article, until the very end, was written in all apparent seriousness. Only in the last paragraph, a comment by the unnamed person communicating the edict from Danzig, did Franklin tip his hand.

Some take this edict to be merely one of the King’s
jeux d’esprit.
Others suppose it is serious, and that he means a quarrel with England. But all here think the assertion it concludes with, “that these regulations are copied from Acts of the English Parliament respecting their colonies,” a very injurious one; it being impossible to believe that a people distinguished for their love of liberty, a nation so wise, so liberal in its sentiments, so just and equitable towards its neighbours, should, from mean and injudicious views of petty immediate profit, treat its own children in a manner so arbitrary and tyrannical!

Upon publication of this piece Franklin had the pleasure of watching readers swallow the bait before realizing they had been hooked. “I was down at Lord Le Despencer’s when the post brought in that day’s papers,” he wrote William. Several gentlemen were present, including Paul Whitehead, a satirist of some note (and a former associate of John Wilkes).

He had them in another room, and we were chatting in the breakfast parlour, when he came running in to us, out of breath, with the paper in his hand. Here! says he, here’s the news for ye!
Here’s the king of Prussia, claiming a right to this kingdom!
All stared, and I as much as any body; and he went on to read it. When he had read two or three paragraphs, a gentleman present said,
Damn his impudence. I dare say we shall hear by next post he is upon his march with one hundred thousand men to back this.
Whitehead, who is very shrewd, soon after began to smoke it, and looking in my face said,
I’ll be hanged if this is not some of your American jokes upon us.

Franklin’s other noteworthy piece that autumn was more straightforwardly satire. The title—“Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One”—put readers on notice that something was amiss.
An ancient sage (Themistocles, as it happened) had once formulated a set of rules by which a small city might be enlarged into a great one; the current author—who labeled himself “a modern Simpleton” and signed himself “Q.E.D.”—essayed the reverse.

“In the first place, Gentlemen, you are to consider that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges. Turn your attention therefore first to your remotest provinces, that as you get rid of them, the next may follow in order.”

Second, in order that such separation remain possible, special care should be taken that the provinces not be incorporated into the Mother Country, that they not enjoy the same rights and privileges, but that they be subject to laws more severe, and not of their own enacting.

Third, should said provinces acquire strength of trade or fleet, strength that enabled them to assist the Mother Country in wartime, this must be forgotten by the Mother Country, or treated as an affront. Should the colonists acquire the spirit of liberty, nurtured in the principles of the Mother Country’s own revolution, this must be stamped out. “For such principles, after a revolution is thoroughly established, are of
no more use;
they are even
odious and abominable.
”

Fourth, however peaceable the provinces, and however inclined to bear grievances patiently, “you are to suppose them always inclined to revolt, and treat them accordingly.” Troops should be quartered among them, troops who by their insolence might provoke them, and by their bullets and bayonets suppress them. “By this means, like a husband who uses his wife ill from suspicion, you may in time convert your suspicions into realities.”

There were several more principles along similar lines. Some mirrored policies already in place; others projected from present policies. The colonists, after loyally supporting the Mother Country in war, should be burdened with taxes and treated with contempt. “Nothing can have a better effect in producing the alienation proposed, for though many can forgive injuries, none ever forgave contempt.” If news arrived of general dissatisfaction in the colonies, such news must be disbelieved. “Suppose all their complaints to be invented and promoted by a few factious demagogues, whom if you could catch and hang, all would be quiet. Catch and hang a few of them accordingly; and the blood of the martyrs shall work miracles in favour of your purpose.”

By the time all these rules were put into effect in the colonies, the outcome would be guaranteed. “You will that day, if you have not done it
sooner, get rid of the trouble of governing them, and all the plagues attending their commerce and connection from thenceforth and for ever.”

Not long after
these pieces appeared, Franklin received a letter from his sister Jane, expressing her hope that he might be the instrument of restoring harmony between America and Britain. He replied that he would be very happy to see such harmony restored, whoever was the instrument. He went on to say that his strategy for seeking harmony had changed. “I had used all the smooth words I could muster, and I grew tired of meekness when I saw it without effect. Of late therefore I have been saucy.” Referring to his two recent sallies in the press, he explained:

I have held up a looking-glass in which some ministers may see their ugly faces, and the nation its injustice. Those papers have been much taken notice of. Many are pleased with them, and a few very angry, who I am told will make me feel their resentment, which I must bear as well as I can, and shall bear the better if any public good is done, whatever the consequence to myself.

In my own private concerns with mankind, I have observed that to kick a little when under imposition has a good effect. A little sturdiness when superiors are much in the wrong sometimes occasions consideration. And there is truth in the old saying, that
if you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you.

21
The Cockpit
1774–75

The wolves were after more than sheep. They wanted Franklin. And they got him. In the spring of 1773, while Thomas Cushing and Sam Adams were considering how to make most effective use of the Hutchinson letters, Parliament revised the last remnant of the Townshend duties. At one time Franklin had hoped for repeal of the duty on tea, but the abandonment of nonimportation removed what pressure Parliament felt on the subject, and Americans settled back into their routine of an afternoon cup of tea, sometimes smuggled from Holland but often brought from Britain, with the three pence duty legally and openly paid.

Yet Parliament, with the clumsiness that had become characteristic of its American policy, managed to revive the rebellious spirit. In May 1773 it passed a Tea Act that, while leaving the American duty on tea unchanged, rebated other duties paid by the East India Company and allowed that company to market its tea directly to the American colonies, rather than through middlemen. Little effort was made to cloak the fact that this constituted a favor to the well-connected but abysmally run East India Company, nor to disguise the great advantage it gave the company over the American merchants who hitherto had bought tea at auction in England. Those merchants, who had little quarrel with Parliament once the bulk of the Townshend duties had been lifted, now confronted the looming specter of monopoly crushing them beneath its greedy heel.

Patriots in Philadelphia and New York were quicker than those in Boston to respond to the new threat, partly because of Boston’s distraction with the Hutchinson letters. But once Boston mobilized, it soon seized the lead against what the Bostonians accounted this latest manifestation of a British conspiracy upon American liberty. Sam Adams and allies insisted that the agents, or consignees, of the East India Company abandon their positions; when the consignees hesitated, the Sons of Liberty attacked the warehouse and home of one of them.

The controversy came to a head with the arrival in late November 1773 of the
Dartmouth,
the first of the ships bearing the East India Company’s tea. A standoff ensued between the Sons and the consignees. Adams whipped up enthusiasm for the former by calling a series of mass meetings; several thousand persons from the city and suburbs attended, shouting defiance at the East India Company, at Parliament, and at Governor Hutchinson, who was attempting to have the tea landed and who happened to be the father of two of the consignees.

On the evening of December 16 the largest meeting yet brought perhaps eight thousand people to Boston’s Old South Church. At a signal from Adams a group of about fifty men thinly disguised as Indians stormed the wharf where the
Dartmouth
lay, moored next to its recently arrived sister ships, the
Eleanor
and the
Beaver,
which also carried tea. Quite evidently the band of raiders included some longshoremen, for they knew the business of unloading a ship. They brought the casks of tea from hold to deck, opened them, and dumped the leaves out upon the bay. It was a long night’s work, for by morning some 90,000 pounds of tea, worth £10,000, had been consigned to the waves. For weeks leaves washed ashore all about the area. Nothing else aboard the ships was damaged; a single padlock, broken by mistake, was replaced.

The Boston Tea Party
could hardly have happened at a more awkward time for Franklin. While the news of this most recent outburst was crossing the Atlantic, Franklin became linked to Massachusetts in the minds of ministers and others in England as never before, and the linkage did him no credit.

Upon the printing in Boston of the Hutchinson letters, Franklin initially hoped to keep clear of the affair. “I am glad my name has not been heard on the occasion,” he told Thomas Cushing. “And as I do not see it could be of any use to the public, I now wish it may continue unknown.” Yet he added, realistically, “I hardly expect it.”