Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
in the Seven Years’ War and the increased cohesion the colonies achieved in the war altered the correlation of forces between Britain and America. The British did not notice this, but the more astute Americans did.
At first, all was well in Anglo-American relations, as the dispatch of the French was celebrated by both. As early as 1754, Franklin, renowned throughout the world as a scientist, and a prodigious talent in other areas as well, had exposed to his learned British friend Peter Collinson, a successful merchant but also a distinguished naturalist, his opinion that “Britain and her Colonies should be considered as one Whole, and not different states with separate Interests.” He had abandoned his previous hope, broached but frustrated at the Albany Congress earlier in 1754 (which had been convened at the request of the British Board of Trade, a government ministry), for colonial unity of purpose and action. He still favored a Grand Council of all the colonies, chosen by the individual colonial assemblies and presided over by a President General, who would represent the monarch of Britain and America. This was the heart of his plan at Albany. The Grand Council would operate independently of the British Parliament. This largely prefigured constitutional dispositions in America and the British Commonwealth, but Franklin made little progress with it at this stage. The prime minister, Newcastle, completely ignored the proposal when it was presented to him by the Board of Trade in 1754.15
When Franklin had persuaded the Pennsylvania Assembly to set up a colonial militia after the catastrophe on the Monongahela, and accepted a colonelcy in it, so great was the concern about Pennsylvania’s open western border that the British government vetoed the creation of the militia. British reaction to autonomous gestures in the colonies was reflexive and hostile. Franklin, an optimist, chose not to set too much store by that, and the ensuing war buried the hatchet between the British and their colonies (in the heads and torsos of their shared enemies). Even Franklin’s astounding and relentless powers of persuasion made few converts to his idea of trans-Atlantic organization or any devolution like it when he returned as representative (lobbyist, in fact) for Pennsylvania in London in 1764 after a brief absence. He had already been elected a member of the Royal Society and soon was awarded honorary doctorates from St. Andrews and Oxford (and had as much right to be called Doctor as Samuel Johnson). The British greatly respected Franklin and much liked him, but they did not connect their regard for him with any notion that the American colonies possessed any aptitude or representative desire for self-government. Franklin gleaned a notion of what he was facing in 1760, when Collinson arranged a meeting with the president of the King’s Privy Council, Lord Granville, one of the most influential members of the government. Granville wished to discuss the military scene in America, but added, in an unpromising aside, that “The king is the Legislator of the Colonies,” and his will was “the law of the land.” Franklin’s polite remonstrations made no headway.16
When Franklin returned to London in 1764, his chief preoccupation, bizarrely, was to bring Pennsylvania more directly under British rule, in order to emancipate it from what he rightly considered the bigoted autocracy of the Penn family. He had fought against this in various capacities in Philadelphia and construed it as his duty to seek the most likely possible easement of the arbitrariness of the Penns, and so called for the prerogatives of the existing legislature to be gutted, prior to the establishment of a federal colonial authority. His wishes would come to pass, but not as he had initially foreseen. One of Franklin’s closest British friends and one of the country’s leading solicitors, Richard Jackson, told Franklin shortly after the Treaty of Paris was signed that Britain intended to keep 10,000 troops in America, at the expense of the colonies. Franklin replied that the more costs Britain inflicted on the colonies, the less revenue it could expect to have remitted to Britain, recognizing at once the problem the victorious Empire faced. “It is not worth your while. The more you oblige us to pay here, the less you can receive there.” Six months later, Jackson, by then a member of Parliament, wrote to him that “200,000 pounds will infallibly be raised by Parliament on the plantations.” Franklin replied that he was “not much alarm’d. . . . You will take care for your own sakes not to lay greater Burthens upon us than we can bear; for you cannot hurt us without hurting yourselves.”17 He wrote to Collinson in the same line: “I think there is scarce anything you can do that may be hurtful to us, but what will be as much or more so to you. This must be our chief security.”18
13. THE STAMP ACT
Shortly after Franklin’s return to London in 1764, debate began on the Stamp Act, which imposed a tax on printed and paper goods in the colonies, including even newspapers and decks of cards, and was so called because payment of the tax was certified by a stamp on the article taxed. Britain already had such a tax domestically. Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville (not to be confused with Lord Granville), was leader of the government in the House of Commons. In presenting the measure, Grenville claimed the right of Parliament to levy taxes anywhere in the Empire, which was not contested by his fellow legislators, but he gave the colonies a year to propose alternatives. None did so, although Franklin himself did. Franklin achieved prodigies of diplomatic access and advocacy, but he had no legitimate status at all, and was merely an information service from Pennsylvania and other colonies that engaged him, to the British government, establishment, and public. Franklin’s proposal was to have Parliament establish a colonial credit office that would issue bills of credit in the colonies, and collect 6 percent for renewal of the bills each year, and these could be used as currency. Gold and silver currency were scarce in the colonies, as all transactions with Britain had to be paid in cash, and Parliament had forbidden the issuance of paper money in America. Franklin’s theory was that this would be an adequately disguised tax, and would not be unpopular in America because of the desire there for paper money to replace an inordinate mass of informal IOUs. It isn’t clear how the interest would have been collected, or how inflation would have been avoided, but at least it was creative thinking, and a start.
Franklin subscribed to the theory of his friendly acquaintance Edmund Burke that popular discussion of rights was a sure sign of misgovernment, and he watched with concern as the revenue-raising tax became a noisy trans-Atlantic debate about the right to tax. Franklin was shocked at the proportions of the outrage in the colonies when the stamp tax was imposed, in November 1765. There was in the stamp tax a move to tax harmonization in the Empire, but also to strike a preemptive blow for the untrammeled rights of the Imperial Parliament. The English suspected some of the colonial leaders of aspiring to independence, and that must have been correct.19 But they acted in a way that could have been reasonably assumed to fan and inflame that sentiment, not defuse or douse it. The British political class assumed that while there were agitators for independence in America, they were opportunists, rabble-rousers, and scoundrels, and that the great majority were committed Englishmen, loyal to the Crown, come what may. That sentiment was strong, but what the British, from the king down, failed to grasp was that loyalty to the Crown in America depended on the wearer of the Crown appearing to be the impartial arbiter, when necessary, of the interests of all his subjects. If the king were to seem solely interested in upholding the British side of an argument with the Americans, that loyalty, in the face of the higher and more imminent patriotic interest of the colonists, supplemented by their material interests, would quickly evaporate. The British had not sent talented governors to America, with rare exceptions, and as has been mentioned, the conduct of the military expedition leaders had been heavy-handed with the colonists, and completely ineffectual with the French and Indians, prior to Pitt’s taking control of the Seven Years’ War in 1758.
The theory of parliamentary representation of all interests was strained, in part because Parliament was riddled with constituencies that had very few people in them, were controlled by influential individuals, and in any case did not represent the colonies at all, other than in the sense that the national interest of the home islands required some consideration of the Americans. (There were about 9.5 million people in the British Isles, including over two million Irish Roman Catholics who were a good deal more dissentient in spirit as subjects of the British Parliament than the Americans at their most unenthusiastic; there was an electorate of about 300,000, scattered extremely unevenly through about 540 constituencies, and the appointive and hereditary House of Lords had greater powers than the House of Commons.) Even had it been a broad suffrage with equal representation for all districts, it would still have been scandalous non-representation of the Americans, the wealthiest