Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (27 page)

William Franklin, perhaps in reaction to being referred to regularly by his family’s enemies as a base-born bastard, had a yearning for social status that was far greater than his father’s. Among the most thumbed of his books was one titled
The True Conduct of Persons of Quality,
and in London he liked to frequent the fashionable homes of the young earls and dukes instead of the coffeehouses and intellectual salons favored by his father. Both in his social world and in his legal studies at the Inns of Court, where his father enrolled him, William would eventually be tugged toward a more Tory and loyalist outlook. But the change would be gradual, fitful, and filled with personal conflicts.

Before leaving Philadelphia, William had been courting a well-born young debutante named Elizabeth Graeme. Her father, Dr. Thomas Graeme, a physician and member of the Governor’s Council, owned a grand home on Society Hill and a three-hundred-acre country estate considered the finest in the Philadelphia area. Her mother was the stepdaughter of Benjamin Franklin’s unreliable patron Governor Keith. The relationship between the Graemes and the Franklins was strained; Dr. Graeme had felt insulted when the elder Franklin did not initially enlist him to run the staff of the new Philadelphia Hospital, and he was a close friend of the Penn family in its struggle with the Assembly.

Nevertheless, with the grudging assent of Dr. Graeme, the relationship had progressed to the point where Elizabeth tentatively accepted William’s offer of marriage. She was 18, he close to ten years older. It came with a stipulation: William would withdraw from any involvement in politics. She refused, however, to accompany him to London or to marry him before he left. They would, both agreed, await his return to be married.

Once in England, William’s ardor for her apparently cooled far more than his ardor for politics. After a short note on his arrival, he did not write her again for five months. Gone were the flowery clichés he had once penned about their love, replaced instead with descriptions of the joy of “this bewitching country.” Worse yet, he proudly sent her the political screed he had signed in the London
Chronicle
attacking the Proprietors, and he went so far as to solicit her opinion of how the article was received back in Philadelphia.

Thus ended the relationship. She waited months before sending a cold and bitter response, which labeled him “a collection of party malice.” The next day he replied, through a mutual friend, that the fault lay with her fickleness and he would be glad to see her find happiness with another man. For his part, William was finding his own happiness, both with the fashionable ladies of London and, too much his father’s son, occasionally with prostitutes and other women of low repute.
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Benjamin Franklin, who had mixed emotions about the relationship, seemed unfazed by the breakup. His own hope was that his son would marry Polly Stevenson. There was little chance of that, as William’s social aspirations were higher than those of his father. Indeed, William was developing social and financial airs that had begun to worry Franklin. So he began an effort, which would later become a theme in the section of his autobiography that was written ostensibly as a letter to his son, to restrain William from putting on upper-class pretensions. It would ultimately prove futile and become, as much as politics, a cause of their estrangement.

Years earlier, Franklin had warned William not to expect much of an inheritance. “I have assured him that I intend to spend what little I have myself,” he wrote his own mother. Once in England, Franklin kept a meticulous account of all of William’s expenses—including meals, lodging, clothing, and books—with the understanding that they were advances that must someday be repaid. By 1758, even as he was pampering himself a bit with a carriage at Pennsylvania’s expense, Franklin was warning his son to be more frugal on meals and to avoid becoming attached to a high style of London living. William, who was traveling with friends in the south of England, was cowed. “I am extremely obliged to you for your care in supplying me with money,” he wrote, adding that he had changed his lodgings for something “much for the worse, though cheaper.”
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As part of his effort to keep his son rooted in his “middling” heritage, Franklin took him on a genealogical excursion during the summer of 1758. They traveled to Ecton, about sixty miles northwest of London, where generations of Franklins had lived before Josiah had migrated to America. Still living nearby was Franklin’s first cousin Mary Franklin Fisher, daughter of Josiah’s brother Thomas. She was “weak with age,” Franklin noted, but “seems to have been a very smart, sensible woman.”

At the parish church, the Franklins uncovered two hundred years of birth, marriage, and death records of their family. The rector’s wife entertained them with stories of Franklin’s uncle Thomas, whose life bore some resemblance to that of his nephew. As Franklin reported to Deborah:

Franklin may have noted that the description “conjuror” was the same that Caty Ray had once used about him. And William, impressed by the coincidence of dates, surmised that a “transmigration” had occurred.

At the cemetery, as William copied data from the gravestones, Franklin’s servant, Peter, used a hard brush to scour off the moss. Franklin’s account of the scene is a reminder that, as enlightened as he would eventually become, he had brought with him to England two slaves. He viewed them, however, more as old family servants than as property. When one of them left soon after they arrived in England, Franklin did not try to force his return, as British law would have allowed. His response to Deborah, when she asked about their welfare later, is revealing:

As he felt about Peter, so too he felt about slavery for the time being: he saw the faults with only one eye, heard them with only one ear, and rubbed along pretty comfortably, though increasingly less so. The evolution of his views on slavery and race was indeed continuing. He would soon be elected to the board of an English charitable group, the Associates of Dr. Bray, dedicated to building schools for blacks in the colonies.

With William in tow, Franklin spent that spring and summer of 1758 wandering England to soak up the hospitality and acclaim of his intellectual admirers. On a visit to Cambridge University, he conducted a series of experiments on evaporation with the renowned chemist John Hadley. Franklin had previously studied how liquids produce different refrigeration effects based on how quickly they evaporate. With Hadley he experimented using ether, which evaporates very quickly. In a 65-degree room, they repeatedly coated a thermometer bulb with ether and used a bellows to evaporate it. “We continued this operation, one of us wetting the ball, and another of the company blowing on it with the bellows to quicken the evaporation, the mercury sinking all the time until it came down to 7, which is 25 degrees below the freezing point,” Franklin wrote. “From this experiment one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.” He also speculated, correctly, that summer breezes do not by themselves cool people; instead, the cooling effect comes from the increased evaporation of human perspiration caused by the breeze.

His study of heat and refrigeration, though not as seminal as his work on electricity, continued throughout his life. In addition to his evaporation experiments, they included further studies of how different colors absorb heat from light, how materials such as metal that conduct electricity are also good at transmitting heat, and how to better design stoves. As usual, his strength was devising not abstract theories but practical applications that could improve everyday life.
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His visit to Cambridge made such an impression that he was invited back later that summer to view the university’s commencement. “My vanity was not a little gratified by the particular regard shown me,” he admitted to Deborah. But that regard was not awaiting him when he returned to London in the fall.
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In November 1758, more than a year after Franklin had submitted his “Heads of Complaint,” the Penns finally responded. Snubbing Franklin, they had their lawyer, Ferdinand Paris, write directly to the Pennsylvania Assembly, with a copy to Franklin, and then followed with a letter of their own to the Assembly.

On the issue of the Assembly’s power, the Proprietors held firm: their instructions to their governors were inviolable, and the charter “gives the power to make laws to the Proprietary.” The Assembly could provide only “advice and consent.” On the issue of taxation, however, the Penns held open the possibility of some compromise. “They are very ready to have the annual income of their estate inquired into,” Paris wrote, and consider some contributions based on what “is in its nature taxable.”

The murky response, which offered no concrete assurances of any real money, prompted Franklin to write seeking clarification. But a key aspect of the Proprietors’ position was that they would not deal with him anymore. Paris pointedly told the Assembly that they had not chosen a “person of candor” to be their agent. And the Penns, in their own letter, said that further negotiations would require “a very different representation.” To emphasize the point, Paris visited Franklin personally to deliver the Penns’ message that “we do not think it necessary to keep up a correspondence with a gentleman who acknowledges he is not empowered to conclude proper measures.” Franklin “answered not a word,” Paris reported, and “looked as if much disappointed.”

“Thus a final end is put to all further negotiation between them and me,” Franklin wrote Assembly Speaker Norris. His mission stymied, he could have returned home and let others work out the details of a compromise on taxation. So he made a halfhearted offer to resign. “The House will see,” he wrote Norris, “that if they propose to continue treating with the Proprietors, it will be necessary to recall me and appoint another person or persons for that service who are likely to be more acceptable or more pliant than I am, or, as the Proprietors express it, persons of candor.”

But Franklin did not recommend this approach. His usual pragmatic instincts fell prey to sentiments he had once tried to train himself to avoid, such as bitterness, wounded pride, emotionalism, and political fervor. He proposed, instead, a radically different alternative: attempting to take Pennsylvania away from the Penns and turning it into a Crown colony under the king and his ministers. “If the House, grown at length sensible of the dangers to the liberties of the people necessarily arising from such growing power and property in one family with such principles, shall think it expedient to have the government and property in different hands, and for that purpose shall desire that the Crown would take the province into its immediate care, I believe that point might without much difficulty be carried.” With some eagerness he concluded, “In that I think I could still do service.”
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There was no reason to believe that England’s ministers would meddle with the Proprietary charter or strike a blow for democracy in the colonies. So why did Franklin fixate on an ill-considered, and ill-fated, crusade to turn Pennsylvania into a royal colony? Part of the problem was that his animosity toward the Penns had blurred his peripheral vision. To the Yale historian Edmund Morgan, this “prolonged fit of political blindness” seems surprising, even puzzling. “Franklin’s preoccupation, not to say obsession, with the Proprietary prerogatives not only wasted his immense talents but obscured his vision and his perceptions of what was politically feasible,” he writes.

Yet Franklin’s actions can be explained, at least partly, by his enthusiasm for the glory of the king’s growing empire. “Once we fully accept the fact that Franklin between 1760 and 1764 was an enthusiastic and unabashed royalist who did not and could not foresee the breakup of the Empire, then much of the surprise, confusion and mystery of his behavior in these years falls away,” argues Brown University professor Gordon Wood.
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Others in America were quicker than Franklin to realize that it was the prevailing attitude among most British leaders, and not merely the Proprietors, that the colonies ought to be subservient both politically and economically. Franklin’s allies in the Pennsylvania Assembly, however, shared his belief that the struggle was with the Proprietors, and they agreed he should stay to fight them. So, with no personal desire to leave England, he launched assaults against the Penns on three fronts.