The True Benjamin Franklin

So Temple challenged Whately, and the challenge was carried by Ralph Izard, of South Carolina. They fought a queer sort of duel which would have amused Frenchmen, and half a century later would have amused Carolinians. Whately declined to be bothered with a second, so Temple could not have one. They met in Hyde Park at four in the morning, Whately with a sword and Temple with both sword and pistols. Seeing that Whately had only a sword, he supposed that he must be particularly expert with it, and he therefore suggested that they fight with pistols. They emptied their weapons without effect, and then took to their blades.

Temple, who was something of a swordsman, soon discovered that Whately knew nothing of the art, and he chivalrously tried to wound him slightly, so as to end the encounter. But Whately slashed and cut in a bungling way that was extremely dangerous; and Temple, finding that he was risking his life by his magnanimity, aimed a thrust which would have killed Whately if he had not seized the blade in his left hand. As it was, it wounded him severely in the side, and he suggested that the fight end. But his opponent in this extraordinary duel was deaf, and, recovering his sword, as Whately slipped forward he wounded him in the back of the shoulder.

Izard and Arthur Lee, of Virginia, now arrived on the scene and separated the combatants. One result of not fighting in the regular manner with witnesses was that some people believed, from the wound on Whately’s back, that Temple had attempted to stab him when he was down. Meantime Franklin, who had been out of town on one of his pleasant excursions, returned to London and, hearing that another duel between the two was imminent, published a letter in the newspapers announcing that he was the person who had obtained and sent the letters to Massachusetts, and that they had never been in the possession of the executor and consequently could not have been stolen from him by Temple.

He supposed that he had ended the difficulty most handsomely, and he continued to hope for good results from making the letters public. But the ministry and the Tories had now the opportunity they wanted. They saw a way to deprive him of his office of postmaster and attack his character. He had admitted sending the letters to Massachusetts. But how had he obtained them? How did he get possession of the private letters of a deceased member of the government; letters, too, that every one had been warned not to allow to get into a colonial agent’s hands? If the distinguished man of science whose fascinating manner and conversation were the delight of London drawing-rooms and noblemen’s country-seats had stepped down from the heights of philosophy to do this sort of work, why, then, his great reputation and popularity need no longer be considered as protecting him.

It was unfortunate that Franklin sent these letters to Massachusetts in the way that has been described. At the same time it is rather too much to expect that he should have foreseen all the results. But after more than a hundred years have passed we can perhaps review the position of the Tory government a little more calmly than has been usual.

Let us suppose that the Spanish minister in the United States should get possession of letters sent from Spain by our minister there to the Secretary of State at Washington; and we will assume also that these letters relate to a matter of serious controversy between our country and Spain, and are the private communications from our minister to the Secretary of State. If the Spanish minister should send these letters to his government, and that government should publish them in its own and our newspapers, would there not be considerable indignation in America? Would it not be said that the Spanish minister was here to conduct diplomatic negotiations in the usual way and not for the purpose of securing possession of the private documents of our government? Would it not be assumed at once that he must have bribed some one to give him the letters, or got them in some other clandestine way? and would not his country in all probability be asked to recall him?

Then, too, we must remember that Franklin’s argument that the colonies were all loyal and needed only a little kind treatment was in the eyes of the Tories a pious sham; and they were somewhat justified in thinking so. It is true, indeed, that outside of Massachusetts the people were very loyal, and determined not to break with Great Britain unless they were forced to it. But in Massachusetts Samuel Adams was laboring night and day to force a breach. He had as much contempt as the Tories for Franklin’s peace and love policy, and thought it ridiculous that such a man should be the agent for Massachusetts. He was convinced that there never would be peace, that it was not desirable, and that the sooner there were war and independence the better.

The Tory government knew all this; it knew of the committees of correspondence that the Boston patriots were inaugurating to inflame the whole country; it knew all these things, from the reports of the royal governors and other officials in the colonies, and it was probably better acquainted with the real situation than was Franklin. There may still be read among the documents of the British government the affidavits of the persons who followed Samuel Adams about and took down his words when he was secretly inciting the lower classes of the people in Boston to open rebellion.27 About the time that Whately and Temple fought their duel, in December, 1773, the tea was thrown overboard in Boston harbor, and it is now generally believed that Samuel Adams inspired and encouraged this act as one which would most surely lead to a breach with the mother country.

The school-book story of the “Boston Tea Party” has been so deeply impressed upon our minds as one of the glorious deeds of patriotism that its true bearings are obscured. There were many patriots at the time who did not consider it a wise act. Besides Boston, the tea was sent by the East India Company to Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, and in these cities the people prevented its being landed and sold; but they did not destroy it. They considered that they had a right to prevent its landing and sale; that in doing this they were acting in a legal and constitutional manner to protect their rights; but to destroy it would have been both a riotous act and an attack on private property.

The Tory ministry, while having no serious objection to the method adopted in Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York, considered the Boston method decidedly riotous, and from its point of view such a conclusion was natural. It seemed to be of a piece with all the other occurrences which Hutchinson and Oliver had described in their letters, and it confirmed most strongly all the statements and recommendations in those letters. It was decided to punish Boston in a way that she would remember, and in the following March, after careful deliberation, Parliament passed the Boston Port Bill, which locked up the harbor of that town, destroyed for the time her commerce, and soon brought on the actual bloodshed of the Revolution.

Meantime the ministry also attended to Franklin’s case. The Privy Council sent word to Franklin that it was ready to take up the petition of the Massachusetts Assembly asking for the removal of Governor Hutchinson, and required his presence as the colony’s agent. He found that Hutchinson and Oliver had secured as counsel Alexander Wedderburn, a Scotch barrister, afterwards most successful in securing political preferment, and ending his career as Lord Rosslyn. Franklin had no counsel, and asked for a postponement of three weeks to obtain legal aid and prepare his case, which was granted.

The day fixed for the hearing aroused great expectations. An unprecedented number of the members of the Privy Council attended. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Burke, Dr. Priestley, Izard, Lee, and many other distinguished persons, friends or opponents of Franklin, crowded into the chamber. The members of the Privy Council sat at a long table, and every one else had to stand as a mark of respect. The room was one of those apartments which tourists are often shown in palaces in Europe, somewhat like a large drawing-room with an open fireplace at one end. The fireplace projected into the room, and in one of the recesses at the side of it Franklin stood, not far behind Lord Gower, president of the Council, who had his back to the fireplace.

Franklin’s astute counsel, John Dunning, a famous barrister, afterwards Lord Ashburton, told him that his peace and love theory was not a very good ground to rest his case on before the Council. It would be well not to use the Hutchinson letters at all, or refer to them as little as possible; for the Privy Council believed every word in them to be true, and the passages in them which had most inflamed the colonists were the very ones which were most acceptable to the Council.

So Dunning made a speech in which he said that no crime or offence was charged against Hutchinson and Oliver; they were in no way attacked or accused; the colonists were simply asking a favor of His Majesty, which was that the governor and the lieutenant-governor had become so distasteful to the people that it would be good policy and tend to peace and quiet to remove them.

It was a ridiculous attempt, of course, and none knew better than Dunning that there was not the slightest hope of success. The Privy Council would never have taken up the petition, it would have slept in the dust of its pigeon-hole, if the council had not seen in it a way of attacking Franklin. Wedderburn’s speech was the event awaited, and to it the Tories looked forward as to a cock-fight or a bull-baiting.

A little volume published in England and to be found in some of the libraries in America contains an account of the proceedings and gives a large part of Wedderburn’s speech. He has been most abundantly abused in America and by Whigs in England as an unprincipled office-seeker and a shallow orator, with no other talent than that of invective. That he was successful in obtaining office and rising to high distinction as an ardent Tory cannot be denied, and in this respect he did not differ materially from others or from the Whigs themselves when they had their innings. As to the charge of shallowness, it is not borne out by his speech on this occasion. Once concede his point of view as a Tory, and the speech is a very clever one.

He began by a history of Hutchinson’s useful public career in Massachusetts; and there is no question that Hutchinson had been a most valuable official; even the Massachusetts people themselves conceded that. The difficulty with Hutchinson was the same as with Wedderburn, – his point of view was not ours. Having reviewed Hutchinson, he went on to show how ridiculous it was to suppose that he alone had been the cause of sending the troops to Boston, and in this he was again probably right. The home government, as he well said, had abundant other means of information from General Gage, Sir Francis Bernard, and its officials all through the colonies; and he concluded this part of his speech with the point that Hutchinson, by the admission of Massachusetts herself, had never done anything wrong except write these letters, and would it not be ridiculous to dismiss a man for giving information which had been furnished by a host of others?

Then he turned his attention to Franklin. How had he obtained those letters? And here it must be confessed that Franklin was in a scrape, and from the Tory point of view was fair game. He could not disclose the name of the member of Parliament who gave them to him, for he had promised not to do so, and even without this promise it would have been wanton cruelty to have subjected the man to the ruin and disgrace that would have instantly fallen upon him. Nothing could drag this secret from Franklin. He refused to answer questions on the subject, and it is a secret to this day, as it is also still a secret who was the mother of his son. Ingenious persons have written about one as about the other, and supposed and guessed and piled up probabilities to no purpose. Franklin told the world more private matters than is usual with men in his position; but in the two matters on which he had determined to withhold knowledge the world has sought for it in vain.

Praiseworthy as his conduct may have been in this respect, it gave his opponents an advantage which we must admit they were entitled to take. If, as Wedderburn put it, he refused to tell from whom he received the letters, they were at liberty to suppose the worst, and the worst was that he had obtained them by improper means and fraud.

For a time which must have seemed like years to Franklin, Wedderburn drew out and played on this point with most exasperating skill. Gentlemen respect private correspondence. They do not usually steal people’s letters and print them. Even a foreign ambassador on the outbreak of war would hardly be justified in stealing documents. Must he not have known as soon as the letters were handed to him that honorable permission to use them could be obtained only from the family of Whately? Why had he chosen to bring that family into painful notoriety and one of them within a step of being murdered? He had sent the letters to Massachusetts with the address removed from them, and he was here supporting the petition with nothing but copies of the letters. He would, forsooth, have removed from office a governor in the midst of a long career of usefulness on the ground of letters the originals of which he could not produce and which he dared not tell how he had obtained.

The orator went on to cite some of Franklin’s letters to the people in Massachusetts encouraging them in their opposition. He read the resolutions of New England town meetings, and gave what, indeed, was a truthful description, from his point of view, of the measures taken for resistance in America. Franklin was aspiring to be Governor of Massachusetts in the place of Hutchinson, that was the secret of the whole affair, he said; and as for that beautiful argument that Hutchinson and Oliver had incensed the mother country against the colonies, what absurdity!

We are perpetually told, he said, of men’s incensing the mother country against the colonies, but we hear nothing of the vast variety of acts which have been made use of to incense the colonies against the mother country, setting at defiance the king’s authority, treating Parliament as usurpers, pulling down the houses of royal officials and attacking their persons, burning His Majesty’s ships of war, and denying the supreme jurisdiction of the British empire; and yet these people pretend a great concern about these letters as having a tendency to incense the parent state against the colonies, and would have a governor turned out because he reports their doings. “Was it to confute or prevent the pernicious effect of these letters that the good men of Boston have lately held their meetings, appointed their committees, and with their usual moderation destroyed the cargo of three British ships?”

While this ferocious attack was being delivered, – and it is said to have been delivered in thundering tones, emphasized by terrible blows of the orator’s fist on a cushion before him on the table, – Franklin stood with head erect, unmoved, and without the slightest change upon his face from the beginning to the end. When all was over he went out, silent, dignified, without a word or sign to any one except that, as he passed Dr. Priestley, he secretly pressed his hand. His superb nerves and physique again raised him far above the occasion.

It was one of the most remarkable traits of his wonderful personality that in all the great trials of his life he could give a dramatic interest and force to the situation which in the end turned everything in his favor. Burke said that his examination before Parliament reminded him of a master examined by a parcel of school-boys; and Whitefield said that every answer he gave made the questioner appear insignificant. In his much severer test before Wedderburn and the Privy Council he was defeated; but his supreme and serene manner was never forgotten by the spectators, and will live forever as a dramatic incident. Pictures have been painted of it, for it lends itself irresistibly to the purposes of the artist. In these pictures Franklin is the hero, for it is impossible, from an artistic point of view, to make any one else the hero in that scene.

The petition of the Massachusetts Assembly was, of course, rejected with contempt; Franklin was immediately deprived of his office of postmaster of the colonies, and his usefulness as a colonial agent or as a diplomatist was at an end. He could no longer go to court or even be on friendly terms with the Tory party which controlled the government; and from this time on he was compelled to associate almost exclusively with the opposition, who still continued to be his friends. In other words, from being a colonial representative he had become a mere party man or party politician in England, and his own acts had brought him to this condition. While in a position which was essentially diplomatic, he had chosen to write anonymous newspaper articles against the very men with whom he was compelled to carry on his diplomatic negotiations. They naturally watched their opportunity to destroy him; and his conduct with regard to the Hutchinson letters gave it to them.

He fully realized his situation, and made preparations to return to Philadelphia. He was, in fact, in danger of arrest; and the government had sent to America for the originals of some of his letters on which to base a prosecution for treason. But when it became known that the first Continental Congress was called to meet in September, he was persuaded to remain, as the Congress might have business for him to transact. He still believed that all difficulties would be finally settled. He did not think that there would be war; and this belief may have been caused partly by his conviction of the utter folly of such a war and partly because it was impossible for him to get full and accurate information of the real state of mind of the people in America. He had great faith in a change of ministry. If the Americans refused for another year to buy British goods, there would be such a clamor from the merchants and manufacturers that the Whigs would ride into power and colonial rights be safe.

He remained until the following spring, without being able to accomplish anything, but he caught at several straws. Lord Chatham, who, as William Pitt, had conquered Canada in the French and Indian wars and laid the foundations of the modern British empire, was thoroughly disgusted at the conduct of the administration towards America. An old man, living at his country-seat within a couple of hours’ drive from London, and suffering severely at times from the gout, he nevertheless aroused himself to reopen the subject in the House of Lords. He sent for Franklin, who has left us a most graphic account of the great man, so magnificent, eloquent, and gracious in his declining years.

Franklin went over the whole ground with him; but the aged nobleman who had been such a conqueror of nations was fond of having everything his own way, and Franklin confesses that he was so charmed in watching the wonderful powers of his mind that he cared but little about criticising his plans. His lordship raised the question in the House of Lords in a grand oration, parts of which are still spoken by our school-boys, and he followed it by other speeches. He was for withdrawing all the troops from the colonies and restoring peace; but his oratory had no more effect on Parliament than Franklin’s jokes.

At the same time Lord Howe, brother of the General Howe who was afterwards prominent in the war against the colonies, attempted a plan of pacification which was to be accomplished through Franklin’s aid. The Howes were favorably inclined towards America. Their brother, General Viscount Howe, had been very popular in the colonies, was killed at Ticonderoga in 1758 in the French and Indian war, and Massachusetts had erected a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey.

Lord Howe’s object was to secure some basis of compromise which both Franklin and the ministry could agree upon, an essential part of which was that his lordship was to be sent over to the colonies as a special commissioner to arrange final terms. The negotiations began by Franklin being asked to play chess with Lord Howe’s sister, and he was also approached by a prominent Quaker, David Barclay, and by his old friend, Dr. Fothergill. There were numerous interviews, and Franklin prepared several papers containing conditions to which he thought the colonies would agree. Lord Howe promised him high rewards in case of success, and even offered, as an assurance of the good things to come, to pay him at once the arrears of his salary as agent of Massachusetts.

Whether this was a sincere attempt at accommodation on the part of some of the more moderate of the Tories, or a scheme of Lord Howe’s private ambition, or a mere trap for Franklin, has never been made clear. Franklin, however, rejected all the bribes and stood on the safe ground of terms which he knew would be acceptable in America; so this attempt also came to naught.

After reading the long account Franklin has given of these negotiations, and the innumerable letters and proposals that were exchanged, one may see many causes of the break with the colonies, – ignorance, blindness, the infatuation of the king or of North or of Townsend, – but the primary cause of all is the one given at the end by Franklin, – corruption. The whole British government of that time was penetrated through and through with a vast system of bribery. Statesmen and politicians cared for nothing and would do nothing that did not give them offices to distribute. That was one of the objects of Lord Howe’s scheme. Dr. Fothergill was intimate with all the governing class, and he said to Franklin, “Whatever specious pretences are offered, they are hollow; to get a larger field on which to fatten a herd of worthless parasites is all that is regarded.” England lost her colonies by corruption, and she could not have built up her present vast colonial empire unless corruption had been abolished.

At the end of April Franklin set out on his return to Philadelphia, and there was some question whether he would not be arrested before he could start. He used some precautions in getting away as quietly as possible, and sailed from Portsmouth unmolested.

He still believed that there would be no war, and fully expected to return in October with instructions from the Continental Congress that would end the controversy. His ground for this belief seems to have been the old one that the hostility in England towards America was purely a ministerial or party question, and would be overthrown by the refusal of the colonists to buy British goods. But on his arrival in Philadelphia on the 5th of May he heard of the battle of Lexington, and never after that entertained much hope of a peaceful accommodation.

VIII

AT HOME AGAIN

Franklin’s wife had died while he was in England, and his daughter, Mrs. Sarah Bache, was now mistress of his new house, which had been built during his absence. The day after his arrival the Assembly made him one of its deputies in the Continental Congress which was soon to meet in Philadelphia. For the next eighteen months (from his arrival on the 5th of May, 1775, until October 26, 1776, when he sailed for France) every hour of his time seems to have been occupied with labors which would have been enough for a man in his prime, but for one seventy years old were a heavy burden.

He was made Postmaster-General of the united colonies, and prepared a plan for a line of posts from Maine to Georgia. He dropped all his conservatism and became very earnest for the war, but was humorous and easy-going about everything. He had, of course, the privilege of franking his own letters; but instead of the usual form, “Free. B. Franklin,” he would mark them “B free Franklin.” He prepared a plan or constitution for the union of the colonies, which will be considered hereafter. Besides his work in Congress, he was soon made a member of the Pennsylvania Legislature, and was on the Committee of Safety which was preparing the defences of the province, and was, in effect, the executive government in place of the proprietary governor. From six to nine in the morning he was with this committee, and from nine till four in the afternoon he attended the session of Congress. He assisted in devising plans for obstructing the channel of the Delaware River, and the chevaux-de-frise, as they were called, which were placed in the water were largely of his design.