The British Are Coming. Rick Atkinson
Priestley, a fellow natural philosopher who lived a mile distant. As Franklin made his way across the city he had once loved, those anxieties weighed on him. How far he had traveled, this fifteenth child of an impoverished Boston candlemaker! With only two years of formal schooling, he had become not only a prosperous printer but the largest bookseller in Philadelphia and the most prominent paper merchant in America. At forty-two, self-made, he retired from the trades to devote himself to good causes—smallpox inoculations, paper money, and streets made safer by night watchmen paid through public taxes. He also threw himself into practical science, with inventions ranging from bifocals to efficient stoves. He had once told his mother that for his epitaph, “I would rather have it said, ‘He died usefully,’ than, ‘He died rich.’” His 1751 treatise Experiments and Observations on Electricity brought international fame for discoveries lauded by a contemporary as “the greatest, perhaps, since the time of Sir Isaac Newton.” He not only invented the first device for storing electrical charges, he also named it—the battery—as he named other things in this new field: conductor, charge, discharge, armature. Electrical experimenters in France were known as franklinistes. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant called him “the new Prometheus,” a man who had captured heaven’s fire.
He was proud, perhaps prideful. The ink-stained printer became Dr. Franklin, thanks to the honorary degrees from Oxford and St. Andrews, and he was not above snickering at American provincialism. “Learned and ingenious foreigners that come to England almost all make a point of visiting me,” he had written in 1772 to his son William, who, thanks to Franklin’s influence, was the royal governor of New Jersey. “The K[ing] too has lately been heard to speak of me with great regard.” If esteemed and clubbable, he still at times seemed opaque. A man of masks and personas, he was Poor Richard, after the pseudonym adopted for the almanac he’d first published in 1732; he was also, thanks to his many whimsical pen names, Silence Dogood, Cecilia Shortface, and Obadiah Plainman. Since moving to London at age fifty-one to represent Pennsylvania, and then other colonies, he had used forty-two different signatures on his published articles.
So, too, was he a creature of contradiction. An advocate for the rights of man, he had owned slaves for thirty years, complaining that most of them were thieves. A man of temperance and discretion, he enjoyed “intrigues with low women that fell in my way” and took a common-law wife in 1730. Perhaps most confounding, he had been a zealous citizen of the empire, so exuberant in his Anglophilia that in September 1761 he curtailed a trip to the Continent to attend George III’s coronation. He had long favored excluding Germans and other non-English émigrés from the colonies. Americans “love and honor the name of Englishman,” Franklin had written in the London Chronicle in 1770; aping “English manners, fashions, and manufacturers, they have no desire of breaking the connections between the two countries.” Yet in the past year he had become so hostile to Britain that now he could fulminate like a Boston radical, his face white with rage. Franklin, these days, was a few steps ahead of an arrest warrant.
His good friend Priestley, beak-nosed and thin-lipped, offered a sympathetic ear. As librarian and companion to the Earl of Shelburne, Priestley lived in the earl’s sprawling mansion just off Berkeley Square. The son of a Calvinist cloth dresser, he, too, was a universal genius, one who, it was said, wrote books faster than people could read them. The previous August he had discovered the gas called oxygen, and he would be credited with identifying nitrogen, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and other gases, as well as photosynthesis, the principles of combustion, and the recipe for soda water. On this Monday he and Franklin pondered electricity and sundry scientific mysteries, as they had for years. Then the conversation turned to politics and what Franklin called “the impending calamities.” “Much of the time was employed in reading American newspapers,” Priestley later wrote of that day with Franklin, “especially accounts of the reception which the Boston Port Bill met with in America. And as he read … the tears trickled down his cheeks.” The coming war would likely last ten years, Franklin predicted, and he would “not live to see the end of it.”
He wept, not least, for his own shortcomings. For decades he had championed a greater Great Britain, an Anglo-American union of “mutual strength and mutual advantage.” As political upheaval strained those blood ties, he sought “to palliate matters” with various compromises, including an offer to pay for Boston’s drowned tea from his own pocket. Even now he considered the schism to be “a matter of punctilio, which two or three reasonable people might settle in half an hour.” But by degree he had grown vexed, then angry at what he called the “insolence, contempt, and abuse” of arrogant British officials toward his countrymen; the condescending reference to Americans as “foreigners” infuriated him. His writings turned acerbic: he proposed to answer the British practice of shipping convicts to America by exporting rattlesnakes to England, and his Swiftian essay, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” postulated that “a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edge.”
Then, two years ago, disaster had struck when a wise man did a foolish thing. Someone whose identity remained obscure gave Franklin a sheaf of private letters written by a Crown official in Massachusetts to a British undersecretary, urging stern measures by the government against New England troublemakers. One passage even advocated “an abridgement of what are called English liberties.” In December 1772, Franklin sent the letters to Boston as confidential intelligence for patriot leaders, but six months later they were published, causing an uproar in New England, and then in Britain. Franklin eventually placed a notice in the London Chronicle, disclosing his responsibility. British newspapers vilified him as “this old snake,” “old Doubleface,” and a “base, ungrateful, cunning, upstart thing.”
On January 29, 1774, he appeared before the king’s council in the Cockpit, a Whitehall amphitheater once used for cockfights. For more than an hour, Franklin was pelted with invective, denounced as a “man without honor” and a “hoary-headed traitor” who had “forfeited all the respect of societies and men.” The packed gallery jeered while he stood as still as statuary, wearing a fine blue suit of spotted Manchester velvet. It was the greatest humiliation of his life, and a day later he was sacked as deputy postmaster general for North America. He had made a serious error of judgment, but so had Britain, by demeaning the Crown’s best American ally in promoting imperial harmony.
In the months since that wretched day, he had shrugged off the ordeal to continue mediating between Crown and colonies. He took meetings, public and private, enduring endless palaver with men of influence and no influence, men of goodwill and ill will, men with potential remedies and men spouting nonsense. Franklin admitted to growing “irritated and heated”; he insisted on repealing the Coercive Acts, withdrawing the fleet from Boston, and removing British soldiers to Quebec or Florida. “The true art of governing the colonies,” he believed, “lies in … only letting them alone.” The government secretly intercepted and read his mail, carefully repairing the seals and making copies with a cover note that labeled him “this arch traitor.” Public hopes for reconciliation ascended, then subsided, only to rise again. The stock market jumped in late December on false news that he and Lord North had reached a peace deal.
But there would be no peace. These febrile efforts, he wrote, “availed no more than the whistling of the winds.” While government officials considered him the “great director” of New England radicals, the radicals themselves wondered if he was “too much of an Englishman.” He felt “like a thing out of its place, and useless because it is out of its place.” Like many Americans, he found that the middle ground was narrow and perilous; he, too, gradually chose insurrection. Britain, he concluded, had become “this old rotten state.” He was reduced to quoting from Horace’s Odes: “What is bad now may not always be.”
Franklin spent his final night on Craven Street. The last of his books, papers, and scientific instruments packed, he caught the post coach for Portsmouth on March 21. Beyond the political turmoil, two personal matters gnawed at him as he rolled through Surrey on a route similar to that taken by the king to the dockyards twenty-one months earlier. In New Jersey, Governor William Franklin, the great man’s son, seemed intent on remaining loyal to the Crown. “You, who are a thorough courtier,” Franklin wrote in a letter, “see everything with government eyes.” And in Philadelphia, his