The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (93 page)

The letters could not have come to Dr. Franklin by fair means. The writers did not give them to him; nor yet did the deceased correspondent, who from our intimacy would otherwise have told me of it. Nothing then will acquit Dr. Franklin of the charge of obtaining them by fraudulent or corrupt means, for the most malignant of purposes, unless he stole them, from the person who stole them. This argument is irrefragable.

I hope, my Lords, you will mark and brand the man, for the honour of this country, or Europe, and of mankind. Private correspondence has hitherto been held sacred, in times of the greatest party rage, not only in politics but religion. He has forfeited all the respect of societies and of men. Into what companies will he hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. He will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called
a man of letters: homo trium litterarum.

This last line brought roars of laughter from the lords and many of the gallery. All could appreciate the play on the English phrase; those who recalled their classics understood the reference to Plautus:
“Tun, trium litterarum homo me vituperas? fur.”
(“Do you find fault with me? You, a man of three letters—thief!”)

From wit Wedderburn returned to invective.

He not only took away the letters from one brother, but he kept himself concealed till he nearly occasioned the murder of the other. It is impossible to read his account [the one in which Franklin had owned up to his role in the publication of the letters], expressive of the coolest and most deliberate malice, without horror. Amidst these tragical events, of one person nearly murdered, of another answerable for the issue, of a worthy governor hurt in his dearest interests, the fate of America in suspense—here is a man who with the utmost insensibility of remorse, stands up and avows himself the author of all. I can compare it only to Zanga in Dr. Young’s
Revenge
:

          
Know then ’twas —I.
          I forged the letter, I disposed the picture;
          I hated, I despised, and I destroy.

I ask, my Lords, whether the revengeful temper attributed, by poetic fiction only, to the bloody African, is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy [that is, lack of emotion] of the wily American.

Wedderburn dissected and held up to gory scorn Franklin’s published argument that the letters somehow belonged in the public domain because they were written from public men to another public man on public issues. No, these were private missives, “as sacred and as precious to gentlemen of integrity as their family plate or jewels are.” Franklin had added the argument that the letters were intended to influence public policy. “Is this crime of so heinous a nature as to put Mr. Whately’s
friends out of the common protection? And to give Dr. Franklin a right to hang them up to party rage, and to expose them, for what he knew, to the danger of having their houses a second time pulled down by popular fury?” Franklin had cited the fact that Hutchinson and Oliver desired to keep their letters secret as evidence that they had much to hide. “But if the desiring of secrecy be the proof, and the measure of guilt, what then are we to think of Dr. Franklin’s case, whose whole conduct in this affair has been secret and mysterious, and who through the whole course of it has discovered the utmost solicitude to keep it so?”

Wedderburn reiterated the argument made by the government (and by Hutchinson and Oliver) that the unrest in America was not the work of ordinary people—“these innocent, well-meaning farmers, which compose the bulk of the Assembly,” Wedderburn said—but of self-serving conspirators, of whom Franklin was the “first mover and prime conductor” (Wedderburn liked this phrase enough to repeat it), the “actor and secret spring,” and the “inventor and first planner.”

My Lords, we are perpetually told of men’s incensing the mother country against the colonies, of which I have never known a single instance. But we hear nothing of the vast variety of arts which have been made use of to incense the colonies against the mother country. And in all these arts no one I fear has been a more successful proficient than the very man who now stands forth as Mr. Hutchinson’s accuser. My Lords, as he has been pleased in his own letter to avow this accusation, I shall now return the charge, and shew to your Lordships who it is that is the true incendiary, and who is the great abettor of that faction at Boston which, in the form of a Committee of Correspondence, have been inflaming the whole province against his Majesty’s government.

Wedderburn linked Franklin to Sam Adams, and Adams to the effort to forge a united front against Parliament by the circulation of “an inflammatory letter sounding an alarm of a plan of despotism, with which the Administration and the Parliament intended to enslave them, and threatened them with certain and inevitable destruction.” This letter was accompanied by a pamphlet designed to incite the ordinary people still further. “It told them a hundred rights of which they never had heard before, and a hundred grievances which they never before had felt.” Franklin and Adams did their work well; the townships of Massachusetts
responded as if on cue, with resolves like none ever seen. “They are full of the most extravagant absurdities, such as the most enthusiastic rants of the wildest of my countrymen in Charles the Second’s days cannot equal.” Not least of the absurdities was the treasonous assertion of desire to call in foreign powers to rectify imagined injuries perpetrated by Parliament against the people of New England. “These are the lessons taught in Dr. Franklin’s school of politics.”

What was the purpose of the conspirators in attacking Governor Hutchinson? “To establish their power, and make all future governors bow to their authority. They wish to erect themselves into a tyranny greater than the Roman; to be able, sitting in their own secret cabal, to dictate for the Assembly, and send away their
verbosa et grandis epístola,
and get even a
virtuous
Governor dragged from his seat, and made the sport of a Boston mob.” The destructive capacities of Boston mobs were most lately revealed in the destruction of the tea cargoes of the three British vessels lying peacefully in Boston’s harbor.

For Franklin the prize was more specific: the governorship for himself. Wedderburn conceded that their lordships might find this hard to believe. “But nothing, surely, but a too eager attention to an ambition of this sort could have betrayed a wise man into such a conduct as we have now seen.” Wedderburn offered no real evidence on this point; their lordships would have to judge for themselves. But they should surely keep the possibility in mind in weighing the issue at hand. “I hope that Mr. Hutchinson will not meet with the less countenance from your Lordships for
his rival’s
being his accuser. Nor will your Lordships, I trust, from what you have heard, advise the having Mr. Hutchinson replaced, in order to make room for Dr. Franklin as a successor.”

Through
all of this Franklin remained silent. The audience, including many of the lords, laughed and cheered at the solicitor’s slashing assault on Franklin’s behavior and character, but the object of the day’s entertainment stood before his accuser betraying not the slightest emotion. “The Doctor was dressed in a full dress suit of spotted Manchester velvet,” Edward Bancroft recalled, “and stood
conspicuously erect,
without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed, so as to afford a placid tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it to appear during the continuance of the speech in which he was so harshly
and improperly treated.” He appeared, Bancroft said, “as if his features had been made of
wood.
”

Franklin maintained his stoic silence after Wedderburn ended his tirade. Understanding the nature of the proceeding, he refused to rebut the solicitor or to answer his questions. John Dunning, his counsel, started to reply to Wedderburn but, unable to speak above a croaking whisper, had to stop. Franklin made no effort to speak for him—that is, for himself. He preferred not to dignify Wedderburn’s diatribe with a response, confident that honest men would appreciate the unfairness of the situation into which he had been thrust. At present honest men seemed in short supply; the Privy Council sneeringly rejected the Massachusetts petition as baseless and intended only “for the seditious purpose of keeping up a spirit of clamour and discontent.” The Lord President thereupon adjourned the session.

The government shortly added the expected sanction. Within forty-eight hours of his session in the Cockpit, Franklin received notice of his dismissal as deputy postmaster. Although anticipated, this move struck Franklin as both unfair to one who had built the American post from nothing to an efficient and profitable operation, and symptomatic of the wicked folly of a government that would cut off its nose to spite its face.

The entire business outraged Franklin. He normally made it a point of pride to keep his emotions clear of his pen; he almost always composed himself before composing. But more than two weeks after his encounter with Wedderburn and the Privy Council, he told Thomas Cushing bluntly, “I am very angry.” His anger was both personal and political. Of the former he declined to speak, even to Cushing, lest his remarks “should be thought the effects of resentment and a desire of exasperating.” But he went on, “What I feel on my own account is half lost”—but only
half
lost—“in what I feel for the public. When I see that all petitions and complaints of grievances are so odious to government that even the mere pipe which conveys them becomes obnoxious, I am at a loss to know how peace and union is to be maintained or restored between the different parts of the empire. Grievances cannot be redressed unless they are known; and they cannot be known but through complaints and petitions. If these are deemed affronts, and the messengers punished as offenders, who will henceforth send petitions? And who will deliver them?” Wise governments encouraged the airing of grievances, even those that were lightly founded. Foolish governments did the opposite—to their peril. “Where complaining is a crime, hope becomes despair.”

And Franklin
, treated as a criminal for complaining, had reached the point of despair. There was nothing for honest Americans in the empire but illegitimate insult and unwarranted condemnation. Franklin wrote William with information and advice:

This line is just to acquaint you that I am well, and that my office of Deputy-Postmaster is taken from me.

As there is no prospect of your being ever promoted to a better government [that is, a more lucrative governorship], and that you hold has never defrayed its expenses, I wish you were settled in your farm. ’tis an honester and a more honourable because a more independent employment.