JRM. Franklin is a high complex man to understand. As late as 1763 he wrote about Britain, “that little Island” enjoyed, “in almost every neighbourhood, more sensible virtous elegant minds, than we can collect in ranging 100 leagues of our vast forests.” He claimed that it was America and not England that was corrupt and luxury loving, and the great danger was that the English nation, if it did not draw off some of, “would, like ours, have a plethora in its veins, productive of the same sloth, and the same feverish extravagnace.” (Papers of Franklin)
Like other colonial agents, he naturally opposed the Stamp Act in 1764, but when Franklin saw that passage of the tax was inevitable, he accepted it. After all, he said, empires cost money. In making the best of the situation, he procured for this friend John Hughes the stamp agency in Philadelphia. In doing so, Franklin almost ruined his position in American public life and almost cost Hughes his life.
At this time, not only was Franklin totally out of touch with colonial feelings, but comments he made to Hughes reveal how much of a devoted royalist he was. He told Hughes to remain cool in the face of the mobs that prevented enforcement of the Stamp Act, “a firm loyalty to the Crown and faithful adherence to the government of this nation will always be the wisest course for you and I to take, whatever may be the madenss of the populace or thier blind leaders.”
Only his four-hour testimony before Parliament denouncig the act in 1766 save his reputation in America. It also made him question the wisdom of British officials. He now bristled at the “insolence, centempt, and abuse” that English officals heaped upon the colonists.
The following four or five years had Franklin caught in between an England that thought of him too American and an America that thought of him too English.
Then in the summer of 1768 a possibility of a subministerial position in the Grafton government was dangled before him. Grafton’s close collegue Lord North, told Franklin thati f he could be persuaded to stay in England, the government hoped to “find some way of making it worth your while.” Franklin replied that he would “stay with pleasure if I could any ways be useful to the government.” He told his son that he would be “either promoted or discarded.”
Lord Hillsborogugh, who was the new head of the American Department, blocked any appointment. In January 1771 Hillsborough coldly refused to accept Franklin’s credentials as the agent for the Massachusetts Assembly, Franklin was stunned. Shortly after his, he went on a series of journeys around the British Isles.
Later, Hillsborogough was ousted from the ministry, and Lord Dartmouth was appointed in his place. Dartmouth was a friend of Franklin’s and was sympathetic to America and western expansion. Franklin once again became optimistic that he might place a role in imperial politics. With imperial possibilities opening up once more, he became involved in the affair of the Hutchinson letters, which ultimately destroyed his position in England.
Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in the late 1760’s, had written some letters to a friend in England urging that stern measure, including the abridging the English liberties in Americ, were needed to maintain the colonies’ dependency on Great Britian. Somehow Frainklin got his hands on these letters and in late 1772 sent them to Massachusetts in order, as he said, to convince the American people that blame for the imperial cirisi lay solely with a few michievous colonial officials like Hutchinson. Thus the ministry in London would be cleared of responsibility for the crisi, and the way would be opened for rational settlement of the differences between the mother country and the colonies.
This was a gross miscalculation, for the letters he sent to Massachusetts only further inflamed the imperial crisis. Contrary to much conventional wisdom, Franklin was not at all a shrewd politician or a discerning judge of popular passions, certainly not prerevolutionary passions of these years. As late as 1775 he was persuaded that the issue separating Britain and the colonies were ” a mere matter of Punctilio, which two or three reasonalbe people might settle in half an hour.” He had little or no comprehension of the structural forces and the popular pasions that limited individual actoin. In the end he ws convinced that the glorious empire to which he had devoted so much of his life was broken by “the mangling hands of a few blundering ministers.”
The British ministry now held Franklin responsible for the crisis. On January 29, 1774 he was viciously and publicly attacked before the Privy Council and other observers by Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor general, for being a thief and something less than a gentleman. That was the last straw. He was supposed to have whispered to Wedderburn upon leaving the cockpit, “I will make your master a LITTLE KING for this.” Two days later Franklin was fired as deputy postmaster. Although for a few more months he continued vainly to try and save the empire, advising even Lord Chatham in a last ditch peace proposal, he finally came to realize that eh empire and his role in it were over.
In March 1775 he sailed for America and became a passionate patriot, more passionate than most. The revolution in fact became a very personal matter for Franklin, more personal perhaps than for any of the other revolutionary learders. Even John Adams, who was no slouch when it came to hating, was startled by the degree of Franklin’s revolutionary fervor and this loathing of the king.
