Thursday, January 29, 2009

This Day in Colonial History (Benjamin Franklin Transformed into American Rebel)


January 29, 1774—The Massachusetts Assembly thought that it would be one step closer to seeing the last of their hated royal governor, Thomas Hutchinson, by petitioning King George III for his dismissal. Instead, the petition furnished an excuse for reactionaries in Parliament to strike at the moderate agent for the firebrand colony, Benjamin Franklin.

The monarch’s advisory body, the Privy Council, may have felt it was removing a troublesome bit between its teeth by castigating Franklin from his role in leaking Hutchinson’s correspondence. Instead, it converted a colonial who thought of himself primarily as an Englishman into one of the Mother Country’s most dangerous enemies—a wily foe who gave the drive for American independence prestige, then won crucial support for the new nation as America’s diplomat to France.

Americans visiting London are understandably shocked to find Franklin’s home at 36 Craven Street preserved. Sites in Philadelphia, they can understand—this was the city to which he escaped as a teenage runaway apprentice and that, in turn, he devoted most of his philanthropy. Even sites in Boston, the city of Franklin’s birth, don’t nonplus tourists.

But London is the only city in the world to preserve, in original form, a home associated with Franklin. 36 Craven, just off Trafalgar Square, was where he lived for 18 years, from 1757 to 1775. The address reflected his desire to conquer the center of London as surely as he had the City of Brotherly Love.

He loved London—the adulation he received as a scientist, the friends he could meet in the fashionable new coffeehouses that were providing alternatives to alcoholic establishments, the society women he could flirt with—and his work as agent for the Massachusetts Assembly and as deputy postmaster-general for the colonies provided him with convenient excuses for why he couldn’t go home sooner. He had stayed away from home for more than a decade, constantly pleading urgent business, even when his wife suffered a partial stroke. Her death in late 1774, while he was still away from home, left him some guilt.

In the decade preceding the American Revolution, Franklin sought unsuccessfully to make King George III and his ministers see reason regarding the colonies. In 1774, he had dragged his feet on presenting Massachusetts’ petition to remove Governor Hutchinson and the latter’s lieutenant governor and brother-in-law, Andrew Oliver, arguing that patience was the colonies’ best course.

But then came the Hutchinson letter controversy. You think that the Valerie Plame leaking imbroglio was bad—not to mention the one nearly 40 years ago involving Daniel Ellsburg and the Pentagon Papers? Well, take those two cases, multiply them, then take the product and square it. That’s how controversial the Franklin affair was.

Gov. Hutchinson had been indiscreet enough to write British minister Thomas Whately from 1768 through the following year on how to bring colonial agitators to heel by restricting their liberties. In Massachusetts, the tinderbox of the American Revolution, exposure of their contents would make a sensitive situation far worse than it already was.

Somehow, Franklin came into possession of this political nitroglycerin. He never said how, and we don’t know to this day. But he sent the dozen letters to friend Thomas Cushing, speaker of the Massachusetts Assembly. Don’t copy them, he warned—just show them around to a few trusted friends.

One of the friends Cushing trusted was Samuel Adams. Big, big mistake! The agitator, as thrilled by this correspondence as Count Dracula would be by the presence of a blood bank, copied and distributed it. The reaction, as Adams hoped, was strong and powerful enough that the letters were specifically cited in the assembly’s petition to remove Hutchinson and Oliver.

In England, things got really crazy because of the affair. By this time, Thomas Whately, the original recipient of the correspondence, had died. But his brother William thought he knew the culprit—an American named John Temple, former governor of New Hampshire, now deeply sympathetic to the colonists.

The incensed Temple didn’t sue William Whately for everything he had, as he would today. Instead, he challenged him to a duel. The two men had at each other in England’s Hyde Park. They survived for probably the most common reason why anyone did in those days: the participants’ incompetence with weapons. Neither Whately nor Temple could wield a sword very well, and when Temple nicked Whately, the requirements of honor were judged to have been met. Only Whately’s friends claimed that Temple hadn’t fought fairly, leading the American to reschedule a rematch with the minister.

Enough already, Franklin decided. He owned up in a public display that he’d been the only one responsible for the letters’ distribution. Early in January 1774, sensing that trouble was ahead, he had asked permission to have counsel by his side when he appeared before the Privy Council.

That may have been a mistake: by allowing counsel to represent him, he gave up the ability to speak on his own behalf. This turned out to be critical, because it soon became apparent that it would be him, not the Massachusetts petition, that would occupy the council’s attention.

Franklin’s supporters were outnumbered in the crowded room by detractors by a 4-to-1 margin. The British Solicitor-General, Alexander Wedderburn, subjected Franklin to more than an hour of abuse—rancor so bad, supposedly, that the worst of it never ended up being printed.

What we do know of it was bad enough. Wedderburn charged Franklin with being “the prime agitator” behind the controversy. As Wedderburn continued his assault, with the anti-Franklin crowd of peers hooting and hollering for all they were worth, Franklin remained silent, fuming. Though the court’s manner of conducting busy left him unable to speak, he also believed that the manifest unfairness of Wedderburn’s conduct would turn reasonable men away from the abuse.

The proud 68-year-old bottled up his emotions for as long as he could, then, as soon as the proceedings had adjourned for the day, with the council issuing its previously prepared report exonerating Hutchinson, turned on Wedderburn. Bumping into his tormenter outside the hearing room, he said, with unmistakable intent that would be fulfilled more than a year later: “I will make your master a little king for this.”

That he did. The day after the proceedings, the Council delivered another blow to Franklin by dismissing him from his postmaster job. By that time, he had crossed a mental Rubicon in his attitude toward the Mother Country. Taking off the clothes he had worn to the Privy Council hearings, he vowed that he would never wear them again until he could help dismember the British empire. It took ten years before he could make good on his claim, but he wore the clothes when he signed the Treaty of Paris ensuring American independence.

The breach with England also led Franklin to break off relations with his son William, the royal governor of New Jersey, who had become a confirmed Loyalist, as well as several friends in the U.K. who had not signed with him. It was part of the process that turned this long-loyal British subject into what biographer H.W. Brands termed “The First American.”

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