hands before his death, and were never in the possession of the
executor. But the executor had given permission to John Temple to look
over the deceased Whately's papers and to take from them certain letters
which Temple and his brother had written to him. Accordingly, Thomas
Whately went to see Temple, who gave the most positive assurances that
he had taken only his own and his brother's letters, and he repeated
these assurances twice afterwards. But the suspicion against him getting
into the newspapers, he demanded from Whately a public statement
exonerating him. Whately published a statement which merely gave the
facts and exonerated him no more than to say that Temple had assured him
he did not take the Hutchinson letters. Such a statement left an
unpleasant implication against Temple, for the executor seemed
studiously to avoid saying that he believed Temple's assurances.
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Pennsylvania: Colony and Commonwealth, p. 314.
[27] Hosmer's Life of Samuel Adams, p. 117.
VIII
AT HOME AGAIN