had built up by slow degrees a body of popular rights. It paid the
governor his salary, and this gave it a vast control over him; for if he
vetoed any favorite law it could retaliate by cutting off his means of
subsistence. This right to withhold the governor's salary constituted
the most important principle of colonial constitutional law, and by it
not only Pennsylvania but the other colonies maintained what liberty
they possessed and saved themselves from the oppression of royal or
proprietary governors.
Another right for which the Pennsylvania Assembly always strenuously
contended was that any bill passed by it for raising money for the crown
must be simply accepted or rejected by the governor. He was not to
attempt to force its amendment by threats of rejection, or to interfere
in any way with the manner of raising the money, and was to have no
control over its disbursement. The king had a right to ask for aid, but
the colony reserved the right to use its own methods in furnishing it.
These rights the proprietors were constantly trying to break down by
instructing their governors to assent to money and other bills only on
certain conditions, among which was the stipulation that they should not
go into effect until the king's pleasure was known. They sent out their
governors with secret instructions, and compelled them to give bonds for
their faithful performance. When the governors declined to reveal these
instructions, the Assembly thought it had another grievance, for it had
always refused to be governed in this manner; and was now more
determined than ever to maintain this point because several bills had
been introduced in Parliament for the purpose of making royal
instructions to governors binding on all the colonial assemblies without
regard to their charters or constitutions.
These were all very serious designs on liberty, and the proprietors took
advantage of the war necessities and Braddock's defeat to carry them
out in the most extreme form. The home government was calling on all the
colonies for war supplies, and Pennsylvania must comply not only to
secure her own safety but under fear of displeasing the Parliament and
king. If under such pressure she could be induced to pass some of the
supply bills at the dictation of the governor, or with an admission of
the validity of his secret instructions, a precedent would be
established and the proprietary hold on the province greatly
strengthened.
The Quakers, especially those comprising the majority in the Assembly,
were not at heart opposed to war or to granting war supplies. As they
expressed it in the preamble to one of their laws, they had no objection
to others bearing arms, but were themselves principled against it. If
the others wished to fight, or if it was necessary for the province to
fight, they, as the governing body, would furnish the means. Franklin
relates how, when he was organizing the Associators, it was proposed in
the Union Fire Company that sixty pounds should be expended in buying
tickets in a lottery, the object of which was to raise money for the
purchase of cannon. There were twenty-two Quakers in the fire company
and eight others; but the twenty-two, by purposely absenting themselves,
allowed the proposition to be carried.
The Quaker Assembly voted money for war supplies as liberally and as
loyally as the Assembly of any other colony; but at every step it was
met by the designs of the governor to force upon it those conditions
which would be equivalent to a surrender of the liberties of the colony.
Thus, in 1754 it voted a war supply of twenty thousand pounds, which was
the same amount as Virginia, the most active of the colonies against the
French, had just subscribed, and was much more than other colonies gave.
New York gave only five thousand pounds, Maryland six thousand pounds,
and New Jersey nothing. But the governor refused his assent to the bill
unless a clause was inserted suspending it until the approval of the
king had been obtained, and this condition the Assembly felt bound to
reject.
During the whole seven years of the war these contests with the governor
continued; and the members of the Assembly, to show their zeal for the
war, were obliged at times to raise the money on their own credit
without submitting their bill to the governor for his approval. In these
struggles Franklin bore a prominent part, drafting the replies which the
Assembly made to the governor's messages, and acquiring a most thorough
knowledge of all the principles of colonial liberty. At the same time he
continued to enjoy jovial personal relations with the governors whom he
resisted so vigorously in the Assembly, and was often invited to dine
with them, when they would joke with him about his support of the
Quakers.
The disputes were increased about the time of Braddock's defeat by a new
subject of controversy. As the Assembly was passing bills for war
supplies which had to be raised by taxation, it was thought to be no
more than right that the proprietary estates should also bear their
share of the tax. The proprietors owned vast tracts of land which they
had not yet sold to the people, and as the war was being waged for the
defence of these as well as all the other property of the country, the
Assembly and the people in general were naturally very indignant when
the governor refused his consent to any bill which did not expressly
exempt these lands from taxation. The amount assessed on the proprietary
land was trifling,--only five hundred pounds; but both parties felt that
they were contending for a principle, and when some gentlemen offered to
pay the whole amount in order to stop the dispute, it was rejected.
The proprietors, through the governor, offered a sort of indirect bribe
in the form of large gifts of land,--a thousand acres to every colonel,
five hundred to every captain, and so on down to two hundred to each
private,--which seemed very liberal, and was an attempt to put the
Assembly in an unpatriotic position if it should refuse to exempt the
estates after such a generous offer. But the Assembly was unmoved, and
declined to vote any more money for the purposes of the war, if it
involved a sacrifice of the liberties of the people or enabled the
proprietors to escape taxation. "Those," said Franklin, "who would give
up essential liberty for the sake of a little temporary safety, deserve
neither liberty nor safety."
But the proprietors were determined to carry the point of exemption of
their estates, and as a clamor was being raised against them in England
for defeating, through their governor, the efforts of the Assembly to
raise money for the war, they sent over word that they would subscribe
five thousand pounds for the protection of the colony. Such munificence
took the Assembly by surprise, and an appropriation bill was passed
without taxing the proprietary estates. But popular resentment against
the proprietors was raised to a high pitch when it was discovered that
the five thousand pounds was to be collected out of the arrears of
quit-rents due the proprietors. It was merely a clever trick on their
part to saddle their bad debts on the province, have their estates
exempted from taxation, and at the same time give themselves a
reputation for generosity.
The defeat of Braddock in July, 1755, was followed in September and
October by a terrible invasion of the Indians, who massacred the farmers
almost as far east as Philadelphia. Evidently something more was
necessary to protect the province than the mere loose organization of
the Associators, and a militia law drafted by Franklin was passed by the
Quaker Assembly. The law had a long preamble attached, which he had
prepared with great ingenuity to satisfy Quaker scruples. It was made up
largely of previous Quaker utterances on war, and declared that while it
would be persecution, and therefore unlawful in Pennsylvania, to compel
Quakers to bear arms against their consciences, so it would be wrong to
prohibit from engaging in war those who thought it their duty. The
Quaker Assembly, as representing all the people of the province, would
accordingly furnish to those who wanted to fight the legal means for
carrying out their wish; and the law then went on to show how they
should be organized as soldiers.
In his _Gazette_ Franklin published a Dialogue written by himself, which
was intended to answer criticisms on the law and especially the
objections of those who were disgusted because the new law exempted the
Quakers. Why, it was asked, should the combatant portion of the people
fight for the lives and property of men who are too cowardly to fight
for themselves? These objectors required as delicate handling as the
Quakers, and Franklin approached them with his usual skill.
"Z. For my part I am no coward, but hang me if I will fight to
save the Quakers.
"X. That is to say, you will not pump ship, because it will save
the rats as well as yourself."
As a consequence of his success in writing in favor of war, the
philosopher, electrician, and editor found himself elected colonel of
the men he had persuaded, and was compelled to lead about five hundred
of them to the Lehigh Valley, where the German village of Gnadenhutten
had been burnt and its inhabitants massacred. He had no taste for such
business, and would have avoided it if he could; for he never used a gun
even for amusement, and would not keep a weapon of any kind in his
house. But the province with its peace-loving Quakers and Germans had
never before experienced actual war, nor even difficulties with the
Indians, and Franklin was as much a military man as anybody.
So the philosopher of nearly fifty years, famous the world over for his
discoveries in electricity and his "Poor Richard's Almanac," set forth
in December, slept on the ground or in barns, arranged the order of
scouting parties, and regulated the serving of grog to his men. He built
a line of small forts in the Lehigh Valley, and during the two months
that he was there no doubt checked the Indians who were watching him all
the time from the hilltops, and who went no farther than to kill ten
unfortunate farmers. He had no actual battle with them, and was perhaps
fortunate in escaping a surprise; but he was very wily in his movements,
and in his shrewd common-sense way understood Indian tactics. He has
left us a description in one of his letters how a force like his should,
before stopping for the night, make a circuit backward and camp near
their trail, setting a guard to watch the trail so that any Indians
following it could be seen long before they reached the camp.
He, indeed, conducted his expedition in the most thorough and systematic
manner, marching his men in perfect order with a semicircle of scouts in
front, an advance-guard, then the main body, with scouts on each flank
and spies on every hill, followed by a watchful rear-guard. He observed
all the natural objects with his usual keen interest, noting the exact
number of minutes required by his men to fell a tree for the palisaded
forts he was building. After two months of roughing it he could not
sleep in a bed on his return to Bethlehem. "It was so different," he
says, "from my hard lodging on the floor of a hut at Gnadenhutten with
only a blanket or two."
Very characteristic of him also was the suggestion he made to his
chaplain when the good man found it difficult to get the soldiers to
attend prayers. "It is perhaps beneath the dignity of your profession,"
said Franklin, "to act as steward of the rum; but if you were only to
distribute it after prayers you would have them all about you." The
chaplain thought well of it, and "never," Franklin tells us, "were
prayers more generally or more punctually attended."
On the return of the troops to Philadelphia after their two months'
campaign they had a grand parade and review, saluting the houses of all
their officers with discharges of cannon and small-arms; and the salute
given before the door of their philosopher colonel broke several of the
glasses of his electrical apparatus.
The next year, 1756, brought some relief to the colonists by Armstrong's
successful expedition against the Indians at Kittanning. But the year
1757 was more gloomy than ever. Nothing was wanting but a few more
soldiers to enable the French to press on down the Mississippi and
secure their line to New Orleans, or to fall upon the rear of the
colonies and conquer them. The proprietors of Pennsylvania took
advantage of the situation to force the Assembly to abandon all its most
cherished rights. The new governor came out with full instructions to
assent to no tax bill unless it exempted the proprietary estates, to
have the proprietary quit-rents paid in sterling instead of Pennsylvania
currency, and to assent to no money bill unless the money to be raised
was appropriated for some particular object or was to be at the
disposal of the governor and Assembly jointly.
Their attack on the liberties of the province was well timed; for, the
English forces having been everywhere defeated, the Assembly felt that
it must assist in the prosecution of the war at all hazards. It
therefore resolved to waive its rights for the present, and passed a
bill for raising thirty thousand pounds to be expended under the joint
supervision of the Assembly and the governor. So the proprietors gained
one of their points, and they soon gained another. The Assembly was
before long obliged to raise more money, and voted one hundred thousand
pounds, the largest single appropriation ever made. It was to be raised
by a general tax, and the tax was to include the proprietary estates.
The governor objected, and the Assembly, influenced by the terrible
necessities of the war, yielded and passed the bill in February, 1757,
without taxing the estates.
But it was determined to carry on its contest with the governor in
another way, and resolved to send two commissioners to England to lay
before the king and Privy Council the conduct of the proprietors. The
first avowed object of the commissioners was to secure the taxing of the
proprietary estates, and the second was to suggest that the
proprietorship be abolished and the province taken under the direct rule
of the crown. Franklin and Isaac Norris, the Speaker of the Assembly,
were appointed commissioners, but Norris being detained by ill health,
Franklin started alone.
He set forth as a sort of minister plenipotentiary to London, where he
had at one time worked as a journeyman printer. He had left London an
obscure, impoverished boy; he was returning as a famous man of science,
retired from worldly business on an assured income. He remained in
England for five years, and so full of pleasure, interesting occupation,
and fame were those years that it is remarkable that he was willing to
come back to Pennsylvania.
He secured lodgings for himself and his son William at Mrs. Stevenson's,
No. 7 Craven Street. Here he lived all of the five years and also during
his subsequent ten years' residence in London. He had been recommended
to her house by some Pennsylvania friends who had boarded there; but he
soon ceased to be a mere lodger, and No. 7 Craven Street became his
second home. He and Mrs. Stevenson became firm friends, and for her
daughter Mary he formed a strong attachment, which continued all his
life. His letters to her are among the most beautiful ever written by
him, and he encouraged her to study science. "In all that time," he once
wrote to her, referring to the happy years he had spent at her mother's
house, "we never had among us the smallest misunderstanding; our
friendship has been all clear sunshine, without the least cloud in its
hemisphere."
Mrs. Stevenson took care of the small every-day affairs of his life,
advised as to the presents he sent home to his wife, assisted in buying
them, and when a child of one of his poor English relatives needed
assistance, she took it into her house and cared for it with almost as
tender an interest as if she had been its mother. Many years afterwards,
in a letter to her written while he was in France, Franklin regrets "the
want of that order and economy in my family which reigned in it when
under your prudent direction."[22]
The familiar, pleasant life he led with her family is shown in a little
essay written for their amusement, called "The Craven Street Gazette."
It is a burlesque on the pompous court news of the English journals.
Mrs. Stevenson figures as the queen and the rest of the family and their
friends as courtiers and members of the nobility, and we get in this way
pleasant glimpses of each one's peculiarities and habits, the way they
lived, and their jokes on one another.
He had an excellent electrical machine and other apparatus for
experiments in her house, and went on with the researches which so
fascinated him in much the same way as he had done at home. It was at
No. 7 Craven Street that he planned his musical instrument, the
armonica, already described, and exhibited it to his friends who came to
see his electrical experiments. He quickly became a member of all the
learned societies, was given the degree of doctor of laws by the
universities of St Andrew's, Edinburgh, and Oxford, and soon knew all
the celebrities in England. But he does not appear to have seen much of
that burly and boisterous literary chieftain, Dr. Johnson. This was
unfortunate, for Franklin's description of him would have been
invaluable.
Peter Collinson, to whom his letters on electricity had been sent, of
course welcomed him. He became intimate with Dr. Fothergill, the
fashionable physician of London, who had assisted to make his electrical
discoveries known. This was another of his life-long friendships: the
two were always in perfect sympathy, investigating with the enthusiasm
of old cronies everything of philosophic and human interest.
Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen and one of the foremost men of
science of that time, became another bosom friend, and Franklin
furnished him the material for his "History of Electricity." William
Strahan, the prosperous publisher and friend of Dr. Johnson, also
conceived a great liking for the Pennsylvania agent. Strahan afterwards
became a member of Parliament, and was fond of saying to Franklin that
they both had started life as printers, but no two printers had ever
risen so high. He was a whole-souled, jovial man, wanted his son to
marry Franklin's daughter, and wanted Mrs. Franklin to come over to
England and settle there with her husband, who, he said, must never go
back to America. He used to write letters to Mrs. Franklin trying to
persuade her to overcome her aversion to the sea, and he made bets with
Franklin that his persuasions would succeed.
We need not wonder that Franklin spent five years on his mission, when
he was so comfortably settled with his own servant in addition to those
of Mrs. Stevenson, his chariot to drive in like an ambassador, and his
son William studying law at the inns of court. During his stay, and
about the year 1760, William presented him with an illegitimate
grandson, William Temple Franklin. This boy was brought up exclusively
by his grandfather, and scarcely knew his father, who soon married a
young lady from the West Indies. In his infancy Temple was not an inmate
of the Craven Street house, but he lived there afterwards during his
grandfather's second mission to England, and accompanied him to France.
The birth of Temple and his parentage were probably not generally known
among Franklin's English friends during this first mission. It has been
said also that William's illegitimacy was not known in London, but this
is unlikely. It did not, however, interfere with the young man's
advancement; for in 1762, just before Franklin returned to America,
William was appointed by the crown governor of New Jersey. This honor,
it is said, was entirely unsolicited by either father or son, and the
explanation usually given is that it was intended to attach the father
more securely to the royal interest in the disputes which were
threatening between the colonies and the mother country.
William and his father were on very good terms at this time. Every
summer they took a little tour together, and on one occasion travelled
in Holland. On a visit they made to the University of Cambridge they
were entertained by the heads of colleges, the chancellor, and the
professors in the most distinguished manner, discussed new points of
science with them, and with Professor Hadley experimented on what was
then a great wonder, the production of cold by evaporation. They
wandered also to the old village of Ecton, where the Franklins had lived
poor and humble for countless generations, saw many of the old people,
and copied inscriptions on tombstones and parish registers. But Scotland
they enjoyed most of all. There they met Lord Kames, the author of the
"Elements of Criticism," and the historians Hume and Robertson. It was
an atmosphere of philosophy and intelligence which Franklin thoroughly
enjoyed. "The time we spent there," he wrote to Lord Kames, "was six
weeks of the _densest_ happiness I have met with in any part of my
life."
During his stay in England the war against the French and Indians, which
was raging when he left America, came to a close, and Quebec and Canada
were surrendered. It became a question in settling with France whether
it would be most advantageous for Great Britain to retain Canada or the
Guadeloupe sugar islands, and there were advocates on both sides.
Franklin published an admirable argument in favor of retaining Canada,
without which the American colonies would never be secure from the
Indians instigated by the French, and the acquisition of Canada would
also tend to a grander development of the British empire. It was an able
appeal, but there is no evidence that it alone influenced the final
decision of the ministry, as has been claimed, any more than there is
evidence that Franklin suggested the policy of William Pitt which had
brought the war to a successful close. There were many advocates of
these opinions and suggestions, and Franklin was merely one of them,
though unquestionably an able one.
He also published his essay on the "Peopling of Countries" and an
article in favor of the vigorous prosecution of the war in Europe.
These, with his pleasures and experiments in science, occupied most of
the five years, and the work of his mission, though well done, was by no
means absorbing.
When he arrived, in July, 1757, he had, under the advice of Dr.
Fothergill, first sought redress from the proprietors themselves before
appealing to the government; but meeting with no success, he tried the
members of the Privy Council, and first of all William Pitt, the great
minister who was then conducting the war against France and recreating
England. But he could not even secure an interview with that busy
minister, which is a commentary on the extravagant claims of those who
say that Franklin suggested Pitt's policy.
Two years and more passed without his being able to accomplish anything
except enlighten the general public concerning the facts of the
situation. An article appeared in the _General Advertiser_ abusing the
Pennsylvania Assembly, and his son William replied to it. The reply
being extensively copied by other newspapers, the son was set to work on
a book now known as the "Historical Review of Pennsylvania," which went
over the whole ground of the quarrels of the Assembly with the
proprietors and their deputy governors. It was circulated quite widely,
some copies being sold and others distributed free to important persons.
But it is doubtful whether it had very much influence, for it was an
extremely dull book, and valuable only for its quotations from the
messages of the governors and the replies of the Assembly.