Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (37 page)

Over the years, Franklin had been developing a social outlook that, in its mixture of liberal, populist, and conservative ideas, would become one archetype of American middle-class philosophy. He exalted hard work, individual enterprise, frugality, and self-reliance. On the other hand, he also pushed for civic cooperation, social compassion, and voluntary community improvement schemes. He was equally distrustful of the elite and the rabble, of ceding power to a well-born establishment or to an unruly mob. With his shopkeeper’s values, he cringed at class warfare. Bred into his bones was a belief in social mobility and the bootstrap values of rising through hard work.

His innate conservatism about government intervention and welfare was evident in the series of questions he had posed to Peter Collinson in 1753 (see pp. 148–49). Back then, he had asked whether laws “which compel the rich to maintain the poor have not given the latter a dependence” and “provide encouragements for laziness.”
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To Collinson these points were raised as questions. But in his essays in the late 1760s and early 1770s, Franklin asserted his conservatism more forcefully. Most notable was an anonymous piece entitled “On the Laboring Poor,” which he signed “Medius,” from the Latin word for “middle,” and published in
The Gentleman’s Magazine
in1768. In the essay, he chastised writers who stirred up the rabble by claiming that the poor were oppressed by the rich. “Will you admit a word or two on the other side of the question?” he asked. The condition of the poor in England was the best in Europe, he argued. Why? Because in England there was legislation to help support the poor. “This law was not made by the poor. The legislators were men of fortune…They voluntarily subjected their own estates, and the estates of others, to a payment of a tax for the maintenance of the poor.”

These laws were compassionate. But he warned that they could have unintended consequences and promote laziness: “I fear the giving mankind a dependence on anything for support in age or sickness, besides industry and frugality during youth and health, tends to flatter our natural indolence, to encourage idleness and prodigality, and thereby to promote and increase poverty, the very evil it was intended to cure.”

Not only did he warn against welfare dependency, but he offered his own version of the trickle-down theory of economics. The more money made by the rich and by all of society, the more money that would make its way down to the poor. “The rich do not work for one another…Everything that they or their families use and consume is the produce of the laboring poor.” The rich spend their money in ways that enrich the laboring poor: clothing and furniture and dwellings. “Our laboring poor receive annually the whole of the clear revenues of the nation.” He also debunked the idea of imposing a higher minimum wage: “A law might be made to raise their wages; but if our manufactures are too dear, they might not vend abroad.”
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His economic conservatism was balanced, however, by his fundamental moral belief that actions should be judged by how much they benefit the common good. Policies that encouraged hard work were good, but not because they led to great accumulations of private wealth; they were good because they increased the total well-being of a community and the dignity of every aspiring individual. People who acquired more wealth than they needed had a duty to help others and to create civic institutions that promoted the success of others. “His ideal was of a prosperous middle class whose members lived simple lives of democratic equality,” writes James Campbell. “Those who met with greater economic success in life were responsible to help those in genuine need; but those who from lack of virtue failed to pull their own weight could expect no help from society.”
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To this philosophical mix Franklin added an increasingly fervent advocacy of the traditional English liberal values of individual rights and liberties. He had not yet, however, completed his evolution on the great moral question of slavery. As an agent for some of the colonies, including Georgia, he found himself awkwardly and unconvincingly defending America against British attacks that slavery made a mockery of the colonists’ demands for liberty.

In 1770, he published anonymously a “Conversation on Slavery” in which the American participant tries to defend himself against charges of hypocrisy. Only “one family in a hundred” in America has slaves, and of those, “many treat their slaves with great humanity.” He also argued that the condition of the “working poor” in England “seems something a little like slavery.” At one point, the speaker’s argument even lapses into racism: “Perhaps you imagine the Negroes to be a mild tempered, tractable kind of people. Some of them are indeed so. But the majority are of a plotting disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful and cruel in the highest degree.”
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In his desire to defend America at all costs, Franklin had produced what was one of the worst arguments he ever wrote. Even his facts were wrong. The proportion of slave-owning families in America was not one in a hundred, but close to one in nine (47,664 families out of a total 410,636 American families owned slaves in 1790). Making his argument morally as well as factually weak was the fact that, even as he tried to argue that slave owning was an aberration, Franklin’s own family was among those who still kept slaves. Although the two slaves who had accompanied him on his first trip to England were no longer with him, one or two continued to be part of Deborah’s Philadelphia household.
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His views, however, were still evolving. Two years after he wrote the “Conversation,” Franklin began corresponding with the ardent Philadelphia abolitionist Anthony Benezet. He used some of Benezet’s arguments in a 1772 piece he wrote for the London
Chronicle
in which he decried, using stronger language than ever, the “constant butchery of the human species by this pestilent detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men.” He even edged closer to Benezet’s argument that slavery itself—not merely the importation of new slaves—had to be abolished. “I am glad to hear that the disposition against keeping Negroes grows more general in North America,” he wrote Benezet. “I hope in time it will be taken into consideration and suppressed by the legislature.”

Franklin wrote in a similar vein to his friend the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush. “I hope in time that the friends to liberty and humanity will get the better of a practice that has so long disgraced our nation and religion.” Yet it is important to note that, both to Benezet and to Rush, Franklin included the same qualifying phrase: “in time.” For Franklin, support for complete abolition of slave ownership (rather than merely ending the importation of slaves) would come only in time, only after the Revolution.
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Lord Hillsborough’s solicitous warmth in Ireland, which had so baffled Franklin, soon dissipated. “When I had been a little while returned to London,” Franklin wrote his son, “I waited on him to thank him for his civilities in Ireland.” The porter informed Franklin that the minister was “not at home.” Franklin left his card and returned another day to hear the same response, even though Franklin knew Hillsborough was indeed receiving guests that day. He tried the next week, then the next, to no avail. “The last time was on a levee day, when a number of carriages were at his door. My coachman, driving up, alighted and was opening the coach door when the porter, seeing me, came out and surlily chid the coachman for opening the door before he had enquired whether my lord was at home; and then, turning to me, said: ‘My lord is not at home.’ I have never since been nigh him, and we have only abused one another at a distance.”

Hillsborough “threw me away as an orange that would yield no juice and therefore not worth more squeezing,” Franklin complained. Again he considered returning to Philadelphia. “I grow homesick,” he wrote William. But there was still one factor that kept him from leaving England in fury. Against all odds, he remained hopeful that he could secure for himself (and friends, family, and partners) a western land grant along the Ohio.
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To that end, he had been involved with a variety of partnerships, including ones called the Illinois Company and then the Indiana Company, that had failed to win support in London. In the summer of 1769, Franklin helped organize a consortium so powerful that he was convinced it would be able to outmaneuver Lord Hillsborough. The Grand Ohio Company, as it was named, included a collection of some of London’s richest and most prominent names, most notably Thomas and Richard Walpole. For a while, it seemed the group, known as the Walpole Company, was destined for success. But in the summer of 1770, Hillsborough managed to have the scheme tabled for more study.

The Walpole group, however, was able to keep its prospects alive by spreading around ownership shares to an array of top ministers, including the lord chancellor and the president of the Privy Council. By the spring of 1772, Hillsborough could delay the matter no longer. Even the king let Hillsborough know that he expected the matter to be considered. In April, the board of trade sent the land application to the Privy Council with a recommendation that it be denied. But the Privy Council, two months later, held its own hearing, attended by Franklin, Walpole, and many of their influential shareholders. Hillsborough threatened to resign if it was approved, a prospect that likely hurt his case because many on the council were eager, in Franklin’s words, “to mortify him.” And they did. The grant was approved, and Hillsborough resigned.

Franklin and friends would never end up getting their land grant; the growing tensions between Britain and the colonies intervened. “The affair of the grant goes on but slowly,” he wrote a friend the following year. “I begin to be a little of the sailor’s mind when they were handing a cable out of a store into a ship, and one of them said: ‘ ’Tis a long, heavy cable. I wish we could see the end of it.’ ‘Damn me,’ says another, ‘if I believe it has any end; somebody has cut it off.’ ”

Still, Franklin had succeeded in ousting his nemesis. “At length we have gotten rid of Lord Hillsborough,” he exulted to William. Hillsborough, in turn, called Franklin “one of the most mischievous men in England.” Yet, in that odd way they had of cloaking their enmity in occasional bouts of feigned cordiality, the two men made peace when they happened upon each other at Oxford the following summer. Hillsborough made a point of bowing and complimenting Franklin. “In return for this extravagance,” Franklin reported to William, “I complimented him on his son’s performance in the theatre, though indeed it was but indifferent; so that account was settled. For as people say when they are angry: ‘If he strikes me, I’ll strike him again’; I sometimes think it might be right to say: ‘If he flatters me, I’ll flatter him again.’”
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“There has lately fallen into my hands part of a correspondence that I have reason to believe laid the foundation of most if not all our present grievances.” With these fateful words, written to his Massachusetts supporter Thomas Cushing in December 1772, Franklin stirred up a tempest that would lead to his final break with Britain. Enclosed was a batch of letters, six of them written by Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, a Boston merchant from an old Puritan family, who had once been Franklin’s friend when they had put together the Albany Plan for colonial union in 1754. The letters had been given to Franklin surreptitiously by an unnamed member of Parliament, and he forwarded them to Cushing with the injunction that they not be made public.

Hutchinson’s letters were filled with advice on how to subdue colonial unrest. “There must be an abridgment of what are called English liberties,” he had written. When they were published in Boston (John and Samuel Adams, with the acquiescence of Thomas Cushing, made sure that they were, despite Franklin’s request that they not be), they stoked the growing fury of the radical patriots there.

This was the opposite of what Franklin had intended. His aim was to calm the rebellious sentiments by privately showing Cushing and a few other leaders that England’s misguided policies had been caused by bad advice from people such as Hutchinson more than by unreasonable hatred for America. The letters, he believed, might even promote a “tendency…towards a reconciliation,” which is what, he later claimed, “I earnestly wished.”
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Indeed, most of Franklin’s missives in early 1773 were designed to decrease tensions. “I hope that great care will be taken to keep our people quiet,” he wrote Cushing in March, “since nothing is more wished for by our enemies than that by insurrections we would give a good pretence for increasing the military among us and putting us under more severe restraints.” When the Massachusetts Assembly passed a resolution declaring that it was not subservient to Parliament, Franklin similarly urged the English to refrain from overreacting. “In my opinion, it would be better and more prudent to take no notice of it,” he wrote Colonial Secretary Lord Dartmouth, who had replaced Hillsborough. “It is words only.”
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To make his point without stirring up more animosity, Franklin reverted to his youthful love of satire in two anonymous propaganda pieces he wrote for the English papers in September 1773. The first was entitled “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One.” Noting that “an ancient sage” (it was the Greek admiral and ruler Themistocles) had once boasted that he knew how to turn a little city into a great one, the essay listed twenty ways to do the reverse to an empire. Among them:

In the first place, gentlemen, you are to consider that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.