Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2)

Hutton was one of the simple and warm-hearted friends of Franklin who endeavored by their individual exertions to accelerate the restoration of peace between Great Britain and America, and, like all of Franklin's English friends, who kept up a correspondence with him, while the war was going on, he had to read some scathing fulminations against England.

You have lost by this mad War [Franklin said in one letter to Hutton], and the Barbarity with which it has been carried on, not only the Government and Commerce of America, and the public Revenues and private Wealth arising from that Commerce, but what is more, you have lost the Esteem, Respect, Friendship, and Affection of all that great and growing People, who consider you at present, and whose Posterity will consider you, as the worst and wickedest Nation upon Earth.

Twelve days later, Franklin annexed a postscript to this letter which must have been an even severer trial to Hutton's equanimity than the letter itself.

I abominate with you [he said], all Murder, and I may add, that the Slaughter of Men in an unjust Cause is nothing less than Murder; I therefore never think of your present Ministers and their Abettors, but with the Image strongly painted in my View, of their Hands, red, wet, and dropping with the Blood of my Countrymen, Friends, and Relations.

Franklin's opinion of the King was imparted to Hutton in terms fully as indignant. The letter, in which this was done, was prompted by a letter from Hutton to a third person giving an account of some abominable murders inflicted by American frontiersmen upon the poor Moravian Indians. This time it was not English, but American hands that were red with blood, but Franklin was resourceful enough all the same to fix the responsibility for the murders by a train of indirect reasoning on the King. Why, he asked, had a single man in England, who happened to love blood and to hate Americans, been permitted to gratify that bad temper by hiring German murderers, and joining them with his own to destroy, in a continued course of bloody years, near 100,000 human creatures, many of them possessed of useful talents, virtues and abilities to which he had no pretension! It was he who had furnished the savages with hatchets and scalping knives, and engaged them to fall upon defenceless American farmers, and murder them with their wives and children, paying for their scalps, of which the account kept in America already amounted, he had heard, to near two thousand. Perhaps, the people of the frontiers, he declared, exasperated by the cruelties of the Indians, had been induced to kill all Indians that fell into their hands without distinction; so that even these horrid murders of the poor Moravians might be laid to the King's charge.

And yet [said Franklin] this Man lives, enjoys all the good Things this World can afford, and is surrounded by Flatterers, who keep even his Conscience quiet by telling him he is the best of Princes! I wonder at this, but I can not therefore part with the comfortable Belief of a Divine Providence; and the more I see the Impossibility, from the number & extent of his Crimes, of giving equivalent Punishment to a wicked Man in this Life, the more I am convinc'd of a future State, in which all that here appears to be wrong shall be set right, all that is crooked made straight. In this Faith let you & I, my dear Friend, comfort ourselves; it is the only Comfort, in the present dark Scene of Things, that is allowed us.

The friendship between Franklin and David Hartley had to endure the concussion of some knocks even harder than these. Hartley was the son of David Hartley, the philosopher, from whom Hartley Coleridge, the poet, derived his name. He was a B. A. of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and a fellow of Merton College, and represented Hull in Parliament from 1774 to 1780 and from 1782 to 1784. An adherent of Lord Rockingham, and a warm friend of Franklin, he was naturally enough selected as the British plenipotentiary to assist in drawing up the treaty of peace between Great Britain and America. Before this time, however, he had been engaged in a protracted correspondence with Franklin, marked by a degree of liberality and humane feeling on his part which did him great honor. To alleviate the condition of American prisoners in England, to promote the exchange of these prisoners and British prisoners in America, to bring about a reunion between Great Britain and her colonies, and, that failing, a separation attended by as little mutual animosity as possible, were the generous objects to which his efforts were addressed. In pursuing these objects, he must have found it difficult at times to submit meekly to some of the ireful invective against his King, Parliament and People, which punctuates Franklin's solicitation of his mediatory offices, in behalf of American prisoners, and pleas for a peace between Great Britain and America, attended by really generous concessions upon the part of Great Britain. The year after his arrival in France as our minister, Franklin wrote to Hartley:

As to our submitting to the government of Great Britain, it is vain to think of it. She has given us, by her numberless barbarities in the prosecution of the war, and in the treatment of prisoners, by her malice in bribing slaves to murder their masters, and savages to massacre the families of farmers, with her baseness in rewarding the unfaithfulness of servants, and debauching the virtue of honest seamen, intrusted with our property, so deep an impression of her depravity, that we never again can trust her in the management of our affairs and interests.

As the war went on, leaving its trail of blood and increasing hatred behind it, his language at times becomes even more intense. About a year and a half later, he wrote to Hartley, "We know that your King hates Whigs and Presbyterians; that he thirsts for our Blood, of which he has already drunk large Draughts; that his servile unprincipled Ministers are ready to execute the Wickedest of his Orders, and his venal Parliament equally ready to vote them just." This outburst was evoked by what he conceived to be a cunning effort of the English Ministry to divide America and her French ally. The next outburst was provoked by the same cause. "The Truth is," he said, "we have no kind of Faith in your Government, which appears to us as insidious and deceitful as it is unjust and cruel; its Character is that of the Spider in Thomson,

"Cunning and fierce,Mixture abhorr'd!!"

Finally, all the hurrying feelings aroused in him at times by what he called "bloody and insatiable Malice and Wickedness" became condensed in an abstract term so full of passion as "devilism." Franklin was not the man to take hold of the handles of a plough and then turn back. In his correspondence with Hartley, as with his other English friends, after he entered upon his mission to France, is the clearest recognition of the fact, to use his own robust figure of speech, that England had lost limbs which would never grow again, and his unwavering resolution to give his assent to nothing less than the complete independence of the Colonies. For him, for his country, there were never more to be any connecting links between Great Britain and America except those of mere international good will and commercial comity. Upon propositions of every sort, looking to a reconciliation between the two lands, he lingered solely for the purpose of obtaining for America, when peace finally came, as large a measure of territorial aggrandizement as he could possibly secure. Of a conciliatory bill, of which Hartley sent him a copy, he said, "It might have erected a Wall of Brass round England, if such a Measure had been adopted, when Fryar Bacon's brazen Head cried out, TIME IS! But the wisdom of it was not seen, till after the fatal Cry of time's past!"

It was the almost pathetic desire of such correspondents of Franklin as Hartley to save some sort of organic tie between the two countries from the wreckage wrought by the fatal policy of the British Ministry, which makes it difficult for us to read Franklin's French letters to men like Hutton and Hartley without feeling that the harsh terms, which he often employed in these letters about the English King, Parliament and People, were hardly fair to that courageous and high-minded band of English patriots, who made the American cause almost as much theirs as his own, and stopped only short of treason in the assertion of their belief that the immemorial liberties of England as well as the liberties of America were staked upon the issue of the American contest. It was the extreme outspoken dissatisfaction, with which English Whigs regarded the effort of the British Ministry to force its own violent and technical views of colonial policy upon America, that made it possible for Franklin to write to Englishmen as he did about their government without exciting either frank or sullen resentment. But there was undoubtedly still another reason with which politics had nothing to do. These Whigs not only respected the manly candor, with which Franklin expressed convictions that they knew had been formed by a singularly enlightened, generous and sober mind, once devotedly attached by the strongest ties of tradition and affection to the colonial connection between Great Britain and America, but they had been too intimate with him personally not to be aware that it was not in his nature to harbor any real or lasting malignity of feeling towards anyone. And that this view of his character was correct is shown by more than one feature of his correspondence with Hartley. In a letter to Hartley, he said that, when Hartley's nation was hiring all the cutthroats it could collect of all countries and colors to destroy the Americans, it was hard to persuade the Americans not to ask, or accept of, aid from any country that might be prevailed with to grant it, and this from the hope that, though the British then thirsted for their blood, and pursued them with fire and sword, they might in some future time treat them kindly. But the outbreak does not seem so fierce when he goes on to say, "America has been forc'd and driven into the Arms of France. She was a dutiful and virtuous Daughter. A cruel Mother-in-law turn'd her out of Doors, defam'd her, and sought her Life. All the World knows her Innocence, and takes her part; and her Friends hope soon to see her honorably married." One of the peculiarities of that kindly and facetious nature was that its sense of humor would at times work its way even between the lines of formal state papers; to say nothing of letters to a familiar friend on the conduct of an enemy. Nor could Hartley doubt that the old well-springs of mirth and loving kindness were as full as ever to overflowing, when, in response to a letter from him to Franklin, containing the Scotch ballad, Auld Robin Gray, he received this lively application of the ballad to existing conditions:

I cannot make an entire application of it to present Circumstances; but, taking it in Parts, and changing Persons, some of it is extremely apropos. First Jenie may be supposed Old England, and Jamie, America. Jenie laments the loss of Jamie, and recollects with Pain his Love for her, his Industry in Business to promote her Wealth and Welfare, and her own Ingratitude.

"Young Jamie loved me weel,And sought me for his Bride,But saving ane Crown,He had naithing beside,To make that Crown a Pound, my Jamie gang'd to Sea,And the Crown and the Pound were all for me."

Her grief for this Separation is expressed very pathetically.

"The ship was a Wrack,Why did na Jennie die;O why was I sparedTo cry, Wae is me!"

There is no Doubt but that honest Jamie had still so much Love for her as to Pity her in his Heart, tho' he might, at the same time, be not a little angry with her.

Towards the Conclusion, we must change the Persons, and let Jamie be old England, Jennie, America, and old Robin Gray, the Kingdom of France. Then honest Jenie, having made a Treaty of Marriage with Gray, expresses her firm Resolution of Fidelity, in a manner that does Honour to her good Sense, and her Virtue.

"I may not think of Jamie,For that would be a Sin,But I maun do my best,A gude wife to be;For auld Robin GrayIs very kind to me."

How was it possible for Hartley to remain angry with a man like this, even if he was told by him in another letter that, though there could be but few things, in which he would venture to disobey the orders of Congress, he would, nevertheless, instantly renounce the commission that he held from it, and banish himself forever from so infamous a country as America, if Congress were to instruct him to seek a truce of ten years with Great Britain, with the stipulation that America was not to assist France during that time, if the war between Great Britain and France continued? This was trying, though not so trying perhaps as his statement in still another letter to Hartley that he thought of his reasonings to show that, if France should require of America something unreasonable, America would not be obliged by the treaty between them to continue the war as her ally, what he supposed an honest woman would think, if a gallant should entertain her with suppositions of cases in which infidelity to her husband would be justifiable. Nor was the merry adaptation of the ballad of Auld Robin Gray the only thing of the kind that tended to relieve the tension of the reproaches heaped by Franklin upon Great Britain in his letters to Hartley. In the same letter, in which he depicts the King as thirsty for still further draughts of American blood, and repels with apparently hot wrath the suggestion of Hartley that the alliance between France and America was the greatest stumbling-block in the way of peace between Great Britain and France, he tells Hartley that the proposition to separate France and America puts him in mind of the comic farce entitled God-send, or The Wreckers. It was not hard, of course, for him to be put in mind of something conceived by his own mind. The farce opens with this stage introduction: (A Ship riding at anchor in a great Storm. A Lee Shore full of Rocks, and lin'd with people, furnish'd with Axes & Carriages to cut up Wrecks, knock the Sailors on the Head, and carry off the Plunder; according to Custom.) Then, after a lively dialogue between the wreckers, who have grown impatient with the staunch way in which the ship is riding out the storm, they put off in a boat in the hope of luring her to the shore, and come under her stern, and try to persuade her captain, in the course of another lively dialogue, that his cable is a damned rotten French cable, and will part of itself in half an hour; only to be told by the captain that they are rogues, and offer nothing but treachery and mischief, and that his cable is good and strong, and would hold long enough to balk their projects. The dialogue ends with the exclamation by the spokesman of the wreckers, "Come, my Lads, let's be gone. This Fellow is not so great a Fool as we took him to be."

Familiar affection glistens in every line of the letters from Franklin to George Whatley, and one of them is suffused with the genial warmth of his best social hours. After some strictures on an epitaph by Pope, he said in this letter:

I like better the concluding Sentiment in the old Song, call'd The Old Man's Wish, wherein, after wishing for a warm house in a country Town, an easy Horse, some good old authors, ingenious and cheerful Companions, a Pudding on Sundays, with stout Ale, and a bottle of Burgundy, &c., &c., in separate Stanzas, each ending with this burthen,

"May I govern my Passions with an absolute sway,Grow wiser and better as my Strength wears away,Without Gout or Stone, by a gentle Decay";

he adds,

"With a courage undaunted may I face my last day,And, when I am gone, may the better Sort say,'In the Morning when Sober, in the Evening when mellow,He's gone, and has not left behind him his Fellow;For he governed his Passions, &c.'"

But what signifies our Wishing? Things happen, after all, as they will happen. I have sung that wishing Song a thousand times, when I was young, and now find, at Four-score, that the three Contraries have befallen me, being subject to the Gout and the Stone, and not being yet Master of all my Passions. Like the proud Girl in my Country, who wished and resolv'd not to marry a Parson, nor a Presbyterian, nor an Irishman; and at length found herself married to an Irish Presbyterian Parson.

In the course of one of the summer rambles, which he took every year for twenty years, for health and recreation, Franklin twice visited Scotland, once in 1759, and once in 1771. As the result of civilities received by him in that country at the hands of Sir Alexander Dick, the President of the College of Physicians at Edinburgh, and Henry Home, Lord Kames, a Judge of the Court of Session, and author of The Elements of Criticism and The Sketches of the History of Man, he became a fast friend of these two eminent men. After completing with his son a tour of nearly 1500 miles in 1759, he wrote to Sir Alexander Dick, whose guests they had been for a time, that the many civilities, favors and kindnesses heaped upon them, while they were in Scotland, had made the most lasting impression upon their minds, and endeared that country to them beyond expression. In the same letter, he asked Sir Alexander to assure Lady Dick that he had great faith in her parting prayers that the purse she honored him with would never be quite empty. His letters to Lord Kames testified in even stronger terms to the happy hours that he had spent in Scotland on this visit.

How unfortunate I was [he wrote to him] that I did not press you and Lady Kames more strongly to favor us with your company farther. How much more agreeable would our journey have been, if we could have enjoyed you as far as York. We could have beguiled the way, by discoursing of a thousand things, that now we may never have an opportunity of considering together; for conversation warms the mind, enlivens the imagination, and is continually starting fresh game, that is immediately pursued and taken, and which would never have occurred in the duller intercourse of epistolary correspondence. So that whenever I reflect on the great pleasure and advantage I received from the free communication of sentiment, in the conversations we had at Kames, and in the agreeable little rides to the Tweed side, I shall forever regret our premature parting.

Even more fervid was the conclusion of this letter:

Our conversation till we came to York, was chiefly a recollection of what we had seen and heard, the pleasure we had enjoyed, and the kindness we had received in Scotland, and how far that country had exceeded our expectations. On the whole, I must say, I think the time we spent there, was six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life: and the agreeable and instructive society we found there in such plenty, has left so pleasing an impression on my memory, that did not strong connexions draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the country I should choose to spend the remainder of my days in.

In a later letter to Lord Kames, he returns to the same pleasing field of association.

Your invitation to make another jaunt to Scotland, and offer to meet us half way en famille, was extremely obliging. Certainly I never spent my time anywhere more agreeably, nor have I been in any place, where the inhabitants and their conversation left such lastingly pleasing impressions on my mind, accompanied with the strongest inclination once more to visit that hospitable, friendly, and sensible people.

When we recall Franklin's distaste for theology and metaphysics, the humor that ever lurked about his lips, and Sydney Smith's famous observation that it requires a surgical operation to get a joke into a Scotchman's head, we may well experience a sensation of momentary surprise when we read these earnest tributes to the charm of Scotch social conditions in 1759 – a sense of surprise increased by the fact that, in the Autobiography, Franklin ends a little dissertation on the odious nature of disputation with these words: "Persons of good sense, I have since observed, seldom fall into it, except lawyers, university men, and men of all sorts that have been bred at Edinborough." But all such sensations of surprise pass away when we remember that manly simplicity, practical sagacity, a spirit of enterprise and a love of learning, which no discouragements can chill, were also Scotch characteristics that Franklin shared with Scotchmen.

When Franklin returned in 1771 to the "odious-smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts and most enlightened understandings," amid which Sydney Smith, with his exaggerated humor, afterwards pictured himself as dwelling when he was a resident of Edinburgh, William Franklin did not accompany him.

In Scotland [Franklin wrote to his son after this second visit] I spent 5 Days with Lord Kaims at his Seat, Blair Drummond near Stirling, two or three Days at Glasgow, two Days at Carron Iron Works, and the rest of the Month in and about Edinburgh, lodging at David Hume's, who entertain'd me with the greatest Kindness and Hospitality, as did Lord Kaims & his Lady. All our old Acquaintance there, Sir Alexr Dick and Lady, Mr. McGowan, Drs. Robertson, Cullen, Black, Ferguson, Russel, and others, enquired affectionately of your Welfare. I was out three Months, and the Journey was evidently of great service to my Health.

The letters from Franklin to Lord Kames cover a great variety of topics; and to his observations on some of these topics, which were of a political or scientific nature, we shall return in other connections. One letter was written, when Franklin was on the eve of sailing from Portsmouth to America in 1762, and that the moment of embarkation upon the perilous seas of that time was a solemn one is manifest enough in its opening statements:

My dear Lord,

I am now waiting here only for a wind to waft me to America, but cannot leave this happy island and my friends in it, without extreme regret, though I am going to a country and a people that I love. I am going from the old world to the new; and I fancy I feel like those, who are leaving this world for the next: grief at the parting; fear of the passage; hope of the future.

But never were votive chaplets woven and gratefully suspended by a voyager after a more prosperous passage than this. Franklin left England in company with ten sail of merchant ships, under the convoy of a man-of-war, touched at the heavenly Madeira Islands, and was then caught up in the benign trade winds, and borne safely to the American coast.

The weather was so favourable [he stated in another letter to Lord Kames] that there were few days in which we could not visit from ship to ship, dining with each other, and on board of the man-of-war; which made the time pass agreeably, much more so than when one goes in a single ship; for this was like travelling in a moving village, with all one's neighbours about one.

Among the things upon which Franklin prided himself was the fact that he shaved himself, and in one of his letters to Lord Kames this trivial circumstance is brought to our notice in these wise words:

I have long been of an opinion similar to that you express, and think happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day, than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom to a man in the course of his life. Thus I reckon it among my felicities, that I can set my own razor, and shave myself perfectly well; in which I have a daily pleasure, and avoid the uneasiness one is sometimes obliged to suffer from the dirty fingers or bad breath of a slovenly barber.

There was also a link of friendship between Franklin and David Hume. In a letter to Strahan, Franklin, when on his visit to Scotland in 1771, writes to him that Hume, agreeably to the precepts of the Gospel, had received the stranger, and that he was then living with him at his house in the New Town at Edinburgh most happily. In another letter, a week or so later, he informed Strahan, after a short excursion from Edinburgh, that he was well and again under the hospitable roof of the good Samaritan. Hume was too much of a bigoted Tory not to snarl a little at Franklin's "factious" spirit, when the Revolution was coming on, but, when Franklin was leaving England in 1762, he paid him this handsome compliment:

I am very sorry, that you intend soon to leave our hemisphere. America has sent us many good things, gold, silver, sugar, indigo, &c; but you are the first philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters for whom we are beholden to her. It is our own fault, that we have not kept him; whence it appears, that we do not agree with Solomon, that wisdom is above gold; for we take care never to send back an ounce of the latter, which we once lay our fingers upon.