The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin

by H.W. Brands

“It is supposed an undoubted right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own consent given through their own representatives.”

Needless to say, this proviso severely diminished the appeal to Parliament of Shirley’s suggestion. What was the point of having colonies if not to be able to discriminate against them in trade, manufacture, or otherwise? Franklin knew this. Yet his stricture allowed him to explicate a larger argument: that the American colonists were and ought to be considered full members of the English nation. “I should hope too, that by such an union, the people of Great Britain and the people of the Colonies would learn to consider themselves, not as belonging to different communities with different interests, but to one community with one interest.”

“The strength and wealth of the parts is the strength and wealth of the whole.”

Franklin’s central idea was simple: that the increase of population depended on the availability of land. The critical element in reproductive rates was the age of marriage; couples who married young had more children than couples who married old. (Needless to say, Franklin’s observation antedated convenient contraception.) The age of marriage in turn depended on the opportunities to establish economic independence. In Franklin’s preindustrial day, economic independence for the many required access to land—of which America had an abundance relative to Europe. Europe was already filled with farmers; adding more required displacing some of those already there. America was filled with Indians, who subsisted by hunting, an occupation that resulted in a population far less dense, leaving ample room for farmers.

In an early indication that his views on slavery were changing, Franklin contended that the introduction of slaves could only diminish a nation. Slavery enabled whites to avoid labor, thereby undermining their health and rendering them “not so generally prolific.” Slavery also sapped the moral health of the nation. Franklin at this point did not contend that trafficking in human souls was inherently immoral; rather he decried the bad example it set. “White children become proud, disgusted with labour, and being educated in idleness, are rendered unfit to get a living by industry.” Franklin thought it significant that the northern colonies, having fewer slaves than the southern, multiplied their populations more rapidly.

Yet if Franklin was precocious, he was not foolish. Morris charged that the logical terminus of the Assembly’s line of argument was democracy—a concept that in the mid-eighteenth century was commonly equated with anarchy. Franklin would grow more democratic with age, but at this point he refused Morris’s bait. “We are not so absurd as to ‘design a Democracy,’ of which the Governor is pleased to accuse us,” he wrote. If anyone, it was Morris who was bringing democracy closer, by his adamancy in defense of the proprietors. “Such a conduct in a Governor appears to us the most likely thing in the world to make people incline to a Democracy, who would otherwise never think of it.”

Yet in the governor Franklin found a kindred temperament, if not a kindred intellect. Politics aside, Morris was as reasonable as Franklin. “He was so good-natured a man that no personal difference between him and me was occasioned by the contest, and we often dined together.” At one of these dinners Morris remarked jokingly that he much admired the idea of Sancho Panza, the companion and foil of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, who, when offered a government, requested that it be a government of Africans, as then, if he could not agree with his black subjects, he might sell them for slaves. A friend of Morris, seated next to Franklin, picked up the governor’s theme (perhaps by previous arrangement). “Franklin,” he queried, “why do you continue to side with these damned Quakers? Had you not better sell them? The Proprietor would give you a good price.” Franklin responded, “The Governor has not yet blacked them enough.” In his recollection Franklin went on to say of Morris (and of himself), “He had indeed laboured hard to blacken the Assembly in all his messages, but they wiped off his colouring as fast as he laid it on, and placed it in return thick upon his own face.”

“I am no coward,” says one, in a typical passage, “but hang me if I’ll fight to save the Quakers.” Answers his companion, “That is to say, you won’t pump ship, because ‘twill save the rats, as well as yourself.”

By themselves the forts did little to secure the frontier from Indian attack. Although they did provide a refuge for settlers in the event of further attacks, their primary purpose was psychological. The Indians of Pennsylvania and the neighboring provinces must have known long before this time that they would never be able to resume the ways of life that had sustained their ancestors prior to the arrival of the Europeans; in light of the conveniences consequent to European contact—guns, metal tools, and the like—it was doubtful that many of the present generation wanted to recapture their ancestors’ less sophisticated lifestyle. In any case, the Europeans were here to stay. The only question was which Europeans the Indians would have to deal with. If the French drove out the English, the Indians would have to make peace with the French. During the last two years the French had indeed seemed about to drive the English into the sea. But if the English were determined to stay, then the Indians would have to accommodate themselves to the English. More than outposts for defense, Franklin’s forts were a statement of imperial purpose.

“He used always to speak of the first as a great rogue, of the second as a dirty buffoon, of the third as an impertinent fool, and of the fourth as a choleric blockhead.”

Industry need not wish, as Poor Richard says, and he that lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains without pains; then help hands, for I have no lands, or if I have, they are smartly taxed. And as Poor Richard likewise observes, he that hath a trade hath an estate, and he that hath a calling hath an office of profit and honour. … If we are industrious we shall never starve, for, as Poor Richard says, at the working man’s house hunger looks in, but dares not enter. Nor will the bailiff and the constable enter, for industry pays debts, while despair increaseth them, says Poor Richard. What though you have found no treasure, nor has any rich relation left you a legacy, diligence is the mother of good luck, as Poor Richard says, and God gives all things to industry. Then plough deep, while sluggards sleep, and you shall have corn to sell and to keep, says Poor Dick.

But those who felt threatened by genius could find Franklin hard to abide. Franklin never flaunted his powers, but in middle age, with those powers at their height, he made less effort to disguise them than he had at times past. His fame as a philosopher preceded him, and he did not attempt to prove it unwarranted. He did not demand deference from others, but neither did he defer. The intellectually or emotionally insecure, those who insisted on measuring themselves against Franklin, could easily become jealous of one who mastered nearly everything to which he turned his mind. The politically insecure, those who possessed something Franklin might take away, could find his powers even more sinister.

This was deeper water than Franklin had expected to encounter so soon, but, strong swimmer that he was, he struck out confidently. He declared that this was “new doctrine” to him. Under their charters, he explained, the colonies made their laws for themselves, in their assemblies. These laws were then presented to the king for his assent or veto. But once the king gave his assent, he could not repeal or alter the laws. And just as the assemblies could not make laws without his assent, neither could the king make laws for the colonies without the assemblies’ assent. Granville assured Franklin he was totally mistaken. Franklin declined to argue the matter further in this venue but remained convinced he was right. Yet he could not help being troubled by what Granville’s position portended. “His Lordship’s conversation having a little alarmed me as to what might be the sentiments of the Court concerning us, I wrote it down as soon as I returned to my lodgings. I recollected that about twenty years before [thirteen, actually] a clause in a bill brought to Parliament by the ministry had proposed to make the King’s instructions laws in the colonies, but the clause was thrown out by the Commons, for which we adored them as our friends and friends of liberty.” This sentiment would change when Parliament itself began encroaching on colonial liberties, but for now Franklin was happy to look to Parliament as a protector.

“I fell in love with it at first sight, for I thought it looked like a fat jolly dame, clean and tidy, with a neat blue and white calico gown on, good natured and lovely, and put me in mind of—Somebody.”

As after the previous round of fighting, the Americans discovered that their interests counted for little in the thinking of Britain’s leaders. The news of the capture of Quebec had hardly reached London before interested parties began talking of handing Canada back to the French. British forces had captured Guadeloupe, the French sugar island in the West Indies, during that same glorious season; on the assumption that one or the other would have to be restored to France, influential voices in England advocated keeping Guadeloupe and returning Canada.

Advocates of returning Canada to France contended that imperial security in North America might be guaranteed by the judicious placement of well-provisioned forts and the control of key mountain passes. Such statements, Franklin asserted, betrayed an utter ignorance of frontier warfare. “Security will not be obtained by such forts, unless they were connected by a wall like that of China, from one end of our settlements to the other.” As for the passes, “If the Indians, when at war, marched like the Europeans, with great armies, heavy cannon, baggage and carriages, the passes through which alone such armies could penetrate our country or receive their supplies, being secured, all might be sufficiently secure.” But the reality was wildly different. “They go to war, as they call it, in small parties, from fifty men down to five. Their hunting life has made them acquainted with the whole country, and scarce any part of it is impracticable to such a party. They can travel through the woods even by night, and know how to conceal their tracks. They pass easily between your forts undiscovered.” They required no convoys of provisions, instead living off the land. Nor was there any punishing them after the fact. “When they have surprised separately and murdered and scalped a dozen families, they are gone with inconceivable expedition through unknown ways, and ’tis very rare that pursuers have any chance of coming up with them.” In short, as long as France held Canada, it would hold ...

Against this argument Franklin employed what might have been called a neo-mercantilist argument. In the early days of the European empires, colonies had been seen as territories to exploit, and perhaps proselytize, but hardly to settle. For the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French, the original model of nonsettlement remained the rule, as it did for the British colonies in the tropics. But in North America the original population of religious dissenters and fortune-seekers had flourished, until the number of North Americans in the British empire equaled a substantial fraction of the population of Britain itself. And, for reasons Franklin had explained in his pamphlet on population growth—reasons he reiterated in summary here—the number of North Americans would continue to grow, perhaps one day surpassing the population of the home country. This growing population, Franklin noted, provided an obvious clientele for the manufactures of England.

Some in the contra-Canada camp used the growth of the North American colonies against them, contending that as they grew they would compete with the home country in manufactures. All the more reason for keeping Canada, replied Franklin, denying the conclusion even as he accepted the concern it reflected. What prevented the development of manufactures in the colonies was not legal prohibition but the cheapness of land. Again echoing his earlier pamphlet, he asserted, “All the penal and prohibitory laws that were ever thought on will not be sufficient to prevent manufactures in a country whose inhabitants surpass the number that can subsist by the husbandry of it.” To return Canada to the French would bottle up the British population between the seaboard and the mountains, thereby producing, if not in this generation, then in the next or the next after that, precisely the situation British manufacturers wanted to prevent. To open up Canada to British settlement would have the opposite effect. “While there is land enough in America for our people, there can never be manufactures to any amount or value.”

Some warned that without the French threat from Canada, the North Americans would become dangerously independent-minded. Franklin did not deny that Americans thought on their own. Such was no more than their heritage as Englishmen. But he dismissed any notion that they might become dangerous to Britain. Indeed, it was the colonies’ very independent-mindedness that would prevent danger to London; the danger was entirely to themselves. “Their jealousy of each other is so great that however necessary an union of the colonies has long been, for their common defence and security against their enemies, and how sensible soever each colony has been of that necessity, yet they have never been able to effect such an union among themselves, nor even to agree in requesting the mother country to establish it for them.” If the American colonies could not combine against a universally acknowledged foe, still less could they combine against their mother country. “An union amongst them for such a purpose is not merely improbable, it is impossible.”

When I say such an union is impossible, I mean without the most grievous tyranny and oppression. People who have property in a country which they may lose, and privileges which they may endanger, are generally disposed to be quiet, and even to bear much, rather than hazard all. While the government is mild and just, while important civil and religious rights are secure, such subjects will be dutiful and obedient. The waves do not rise, but when the winds blow.

Parsons, a wise man, often acted foolishly. Potts, a wit, that seldom acted wisely. If enough were the means to make a man happy, one had always the means of happiness without ever enjoying the thing; the other always had the thing without ever possessing the means. Parsons, even in his prosperity, always fretting! Potts, in the midst of his poverty, ever laughing! It seems, then, that happiness in this life rather depends on internals than externals; and that, besides the natural effects of wisdom and virtue, vice and folly, there is such a thing as being of a happy or an unhappy constitution.

In support of this position he cited Thomas Penn’s own father, William Penn, whose charter for Pennsylvania declared that the Assembly of Pennsylvania should have all the power and privileges of an assembly according to the rights of the freeborn subjects of England. Thomas Penn answered that this was more than his father was empowered to grant under the royal charter creating Pennsylvania and therefore had no validity. Franklin replied that if such was true, all the people who were drawn to Pennsylvania under the belief that they would have such privileges had been deceived, cheated, and betrayed. To which Penn responded that they should have looked out for themselves; the royal charter was no secret. If they were deceived, it was their own fault.

More troublesome was the crux of the proprietors’ argument: “The Charter (when read in its own language) gives the power to make laws to the Proprietary.” The role of the Assembly was to provide “advice and assent,” but the initiative rested with the proprietors. This was just the opposite of the view of Franklin and the Assembly, who judged the initiative in lawmaking to reside in the people, with the proprietors reduced to the advise-and-assent role.

But he advised against this, suggesting instead the radical alternative of replacing rule by the Penns with rule by the Crown. “If the House, grown at length sensible of the danger to the liberties of the people necessarily arising from such growing power and property in one family with such principles, shall think it expedient to have the government and property in different hands, and for that purpose shall desire that the Crown would take the province into its immediate care, I believe that point might without much difficulty be carried, and our privileges preserved.” He added, “In that I think I could still do service.”

The first verses of this chapter recounted how Abraham received a visitor, an old man bowed with age. Abraham offered him food and a place to sleep, only to be dismayed when the visitor failed to bless Abraham’s God. Annoyed, Abraham queried why he did not. 7. And the man answered and said, I do not worship the God thou speakest of; neither do I call upon his name; for I have made to myself a God, which abideth always in mine house, and provideth me with all things. 8. And Abraham’s zeal was kindled against the man; and he arose, and fell upon him, and drove him forth with blows into the wilderness. 9. And at midnight God called unto Abraham, saying, Abraham, where is thy stranger? 10. And Abraham answered and said, Lord, he would not worship thee; neither would he call upon thy name. Therefore have I driven him out from before my face into the wilderness. 11. And God said, Have I borne with him these hundred ninety and eight years, and nourished him, and clothed him, notwithstanding his rebellion against me, and couldst not thou, that art thyself a sinner, bear with him one night?

If we keep it, all the country from the St. Lawrence to Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people. Britain itself will become vastly more populous by the immense increase of its commerce; the Atlantic Sea will be covered with your trading ships; and your naval power thence continually increasing, will extend your influence round the whole globe, and awe the world!

To this institutional conflict George II and Frederick added the bad blood that characterized the house of Hanover. Queen Caroline evinced a hatred toward her son almost inconceivable in a mother. “My dear firstborn,” she was reported to have said, “is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast, in the whole world, and I most heartily wish he was out of it.” In her final moments, when Frederick expressed a desire to see his mother, she refused, saying, “I shall have one comfort in having my eyes eternally closed—I shall never see that monster again.” Frederick’s father—whose experience with his own father foreshadowed that with his son—shared his wife’s hatred and disdain for their son. “Bid him go about his business,” George said in response to Frederick’s plea for a last chance at reconciliation, “for his poor mother is not in a condition to see him act his false, whining, cringing tricks now, nor am I in a humour to bear his impertinence.”

I cannot but wish the usage of our tongue permitted making new words when we want them, by composition of old ones whose meanings are already well understood. The German allows of it, and it is a common practice with their writers. Many of our present English words were originally so made; and many of the Latin words. In point of clearness such compound words would have the advantage of any we can borrow from the ancient or from foreign languages. For instance, the word inaccessible, though long in use among us, is not yet, I dare say, so universally understood by our people as the word uncomeatable would immediately be, which we are not allowed to write.

The Church [of England] people and the Puritans in a country town had once a bitter contention concerning the erecting of a Maypole, which the former desired and the latter opposed. Each party endeavoured to strengthen itself by obtaining the authority of the mayor, directing or forbidding a Maypole. He heard their altercation with great patience, and then gravely determined thus: You that are for having no Maypole shall have no Maypole; and you that are for having a Maypole shall have a Maypole. Get about your business and let me hear no more of this quarrel. So methinks Lord Marischal might say: You that are for no more damnation than is proportioned to your offences have my consent that it may be so; and you that are for being damned eternally, G-d eternally d—n you all, and let me hear no more of your disputes.

What most amazed his friends about Franklin was his breadth, his competence in a daunting diversity of fields of human knowledge. A true polymath, he was at home with experts in electricity, meteorology, geology, linguistics, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and politics. That he became one of a relative handful of people in history to invent a popular musical instrument simply added to the luster of his reputation.

When I travelled in Flanders I thought of your excessively strict observation of Sunday, and that a man could hardly travel on that day among you upon his lawful occasions, without hazard of punishment; while where I was, every one travelled, if he pleased, or diverted himself any other way. And in the afternoon both high and low went to the play or the opera, where there was plenty of singing, fiddling and dancing. I looked round for God’s judgments, but saw no signs of them. The cities were well built and full of inhabitants; the markets were filled with plenty; the people well favoured and well clothed; the fields well tilled; the cattle fat and strong; the fences, houses and windows all in repair; and no Old Tenor [paper currency] anywhere in the country; which would almost make one suspect that the Deity is not so angry at that offence as a New England justice.

If Franklin regretted going, still more did his friends and admirers regret his leaving. “I am very sorry that you intend soon to leave our hemisphere,” said David Hume. “America has sent us many good things: gold, silver, sugar, tobacco, indigo &c. But you are the first philosopher, and indeed the first great man of letters for whom we are beholden to her. It is our own fault that we have not kept him; whence it appears that we do not agree with Solomon, that wisdom is above gold, for we take care never to send back an ounce of the latter which we once lay our fingers on.”

I can give but one answer. The King of the Universe, good as he is, is not cordially beloved and faithfully served by all his subjects. I wish I could say that half mankind, as much as they are obliged to him for his continual favours, were among the truly loyal. ’tis a shame that the very goodness of a prince should be an encouragement to affronts. An answer now occurs to me, for that question of Robinson Crusoe’s Man Friday, which I once thought unanswerable, Why God no kill the Devil? It is to be found in the Scottish proverb: Ye’d do little for God an the Deel were dead.

(“Satan preaching against sin,” remarked one listener of Sandwich’s performance.)

If Britons in Britain could not be made to pay more, perhaps Britons across the sea could be. From the east side of the Atlantic the Americans looked like the chief winners of the war, which freed them from fear of the French. They were taxed lightly by British standards, and little of what they paid went to imperial purposes, broadly construed. It certainly occurred to Grenville and others contemplating new sources of revenue that the Americans, unlike those boisterous cider-makers in Exeter, could not vote for members of Parliament. This rendered new American taxes constitutionally suspect, in that a cardinal tenet of English constitutionalism insisted that taxes could be levied only by the representatives of those who would pay. But it made such taxes politically tempting. If the Americans complained, who would be listening?

Americans—including Franklin—interpreted the end of the war as the beginning of a new age of expansion, across the mountains and into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Two other interested parties took a different view. The British government, having just finished a long and expensive war that began on the American frontier, had no desire to let the frontier trigger another such war. To be sure, the French were no longer as able to provoke unrest among the Indians as formerly, but the English (and Scottish and German) settlers had shown themselves sufficiently provocative on their own. The best way to minimize such provocations, it seemed to Grenville and his associates, was to insulate the Indians and the settlers from each other. To this end the government issued a proclamation in October 1763 placing the transmontane territories essentially off-limits to settlement.

The Proclamation of 1763 came too late to mollify the third party interested in the question of western lands—the party, in fact, most interested of all. If the defeat of the French augured peace and cheap land for the English, it did so at the expense of the Indians. As long as two imperial powers had vied for control of North America, the Indians had been able to play one against the other; now, with but one imperial power, the Indians were at that power’s mercy. To what extent the Indians appreciated that London wished to protect them against the Americans is unclear; considering their experience of the last few decades they might have been forgiven for thinking all English acted alike. In any event, while the British government prepared the proclamation it would make regarding the American west, the Indians launched a war against the settlers. Almost at once the war became associated with the name of Pontiac, an Ottawa chief of uncertain origins but undeniable ambition and charisma.

“Confound their politics/Frustrate such hypocrites/Franklin, on thee we fix/God save us all.”

But Grenville—“besotted with his stamp scheme,” according to Franklin—refused to entertain it. Nor was Parliament interested. To some degree the very unpalatableness of the stamps in America became an argument for approving them. Charles Townshend, whom the Americans would learn to loathe, defended the principle of Parliamentary taxation of the colonies: “Will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence until they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

They planted by your care? No! Your oppressions planted them in America…. They nourished by your indulgence? They grew by your neglect of them…. They protected by your arms? They have nobly taken up arms in your defence, have exerted a valour amidst their constant and laborious industry for the defence of a country whose frontier, while drenched in blood, its interior parts have yielded all its little savings to your emolument.

This turned out to be no favor to Hughes, and it was one of the worst mistakes of Franklin’s career. Franklin had a tendency to believe he knew best in most situations, and, brilliant and reasonable man that he was, he usually did. But he grievously misgauged the reaction to the Stamp Act. When news of the act’s approval reached America, several colonies erupted in protest. The first outburst was rhetorical. In Williamsburg, Virginia, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named Patrick Henry stood up in the House of Burgesses—after a tenure there of less than two weeks—and declared the Stamp Act unconstitutional. As Englishmen, Henry said, Americans had the right to be taxed by none but their own elected representatives; as Englishmen they must resist this encroachment on their rights. Inflamed by his own eloquence, Henry uttered words to the effect that Caesar had met his Brutus and Charles I his Cromwell, and that George III might encounter someone similar among the Americans. At this the speaker of the house shouted treason and cut Henry off. Henry thereupon begged the House’s pardon and swore his loyalty to the king—but then undercut his apology by explaining that he had been carried away by fear for his country’s “dying liberty.”

The apology was undercut further by a set of resolves Henry laid before the House. Four of these reiterated in comparatively innocuous terms the rights of Englishmen regarding taxes. The fifth was more straightforward, claiming for the Virginia assembly the “only sole and exclusive right and power” to tax Virginians, and asserting that any effort to vest this right and power elsewhere had a “manifest tendency to destroy British as well as American freedom.”

Yet there was more to Franklin’s predicament than unjust accusations. With the response to the Stamp Act, American politics commenced a remarkable change—a change Franklin had not anticipated and to which he was slow to react. Ironically, however, it built on work Franklin himself had done a decade earlier. Then he had tried to forge a collective identity among the British colonies in North America, and failed. Now just such a collective identity was taking shape in the resistance to the Stamp Act. Upon the initiative of the Massachusetts assembly, a congress was held in New York in October 1765. Nine colonies were represented, including Pennsylvania; the delegates produced a series of resolutions denying the right of Parliament to tax the colonies and urging repeal of the noxious measure.

So did Thomas Hutchinson, who felt the irony of the situation more immediately, and more painfully, than Franklin. Hutchinson wrote Franklin in November assessing the violence in the various colonies, and noting, from his own experience, that in Massachusetts all doubts of the legitimacy of the mob’s opinions had been forcibly suppressed. “It is not safe there to advance any thing contrary to any popular opinions whatsoever,” Hutchinson said. “Every body who used to have virtue enough to oppose them is now afraid of my fate.” Briefly the violence in Boston had diminished, only to revive from example elsewhere. “The riots at New York have given fresh spirits to the rioters here.” Pointing out that the opponents of the Stamp Act had seized Franklin’s motto from 1754, “Join or Die,” Hutchinson remarked, “When you and I were at Albany ten years ago we did not propose an union for such purposes as these.”

However emotionally satisfying, the rejection of the stamps had little effect on Parliament, as it inflicted most of its injury on the colonies, whose influence with Parliament on this subject was demonstrably nil. Another mass action, one that hit closer to the homes of the honorable members, appeared more promising. Upon the passage of the Sugar Act the previous year, calls for an embargo against British imports arose here and there among the American colonies. But not until the Stamp Act galvanized opposition to Parliamentary taxation—and the stamp riots suggested a formidable mechanism for enforcing an embargo—did concerted nonimportation take hold. Just as the Stamp Act was to go into effect, some two hundred New York merchants pledged to have nothing to do with British imports. Philadelphia merchants followed suit, as did those of Boston. Almost immediately nonimportation evoked the desired response. British merchants petitioned Parliament for repeal of the Stamp Act. For them the niceties of constitutionalism were irrelevant; what mattered were their vanishing sales. The point of empire was profit, and without sales there would be no profits.

We might as well have hindered the sun’s setting. That we could not do. But since ’tis down, my friend, and it may be long before it rises again, let us make as good a night of it as we can. We may still light candles. Frugality and industry will go a great way towards indemnifying us. Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and Parliaments. If we can get rid of the former we may easily bear the latter.

Franklin elaborated on the difficulties of enforcing the act upon an unwilling American populace. London might send armies, but the Americans would take every opportunity to encourage the soldiers to desert, which, given the high wages commanded by laborers and the ease of vanishing into the frontier, would be very tempting. A naval blockade could interdict commerce but would ruin Britain’s trade. Franklin recognized that suspension of the Stamp Act, even if followed by repeal, would be a stopgap. Eventually the question of Parliamentary sovereignty and colonial rights would have to be addressed. “I strongly recommended either a thorough union with America,” Franklin told William afterward, “or that government here would proceed in the old method of requisition, by which I was confident more would be obtained in the way of voluntary grant than could probably be got by compulsory taxes laid by Parliament.” But to insist on a final decision at present could be disastrous. To do so would risk creating a deep-rooted aversion between the two countries and laying the foundation of “a future total separation.”

At the start of 1766, a total separation was the last thing Franklin wanted. On his previous visit he had found Britain more congenial in many respects than Pennsylvania; in light of the abuse and threats of violence to which he and his had been subjected of late in Pennsylvania, Britain seemed more congenial still. Had Debbie been willing, he almost certainly would have relocated to London by now. But it seemed clear that Debbie would never be willing; a woman who armed herself against an angry mob to defend her home would not be talked out of it even by one as persuasive as her husband. This being so, separation between America and Britain would force Franklin to choose between wife and friends. He loved his wife; he loved them. He did not wish to have to choose.

Galloway wanted to urge moderation by composing a pamphlet to that effect. “But the difficulty will be in getting it published, the printers on the [American] continent having combined together to print every thing inflammatory and nothing that is rational and cool…. The people are taught to believe the greatest absurdities, and their passions are excited to a degree of resentment against the Mother Country beyond all description.”

He also produced and circulated a political cartoon depicting to what end the Stamp Act and other such measures might lead. The picture was a bloody one, showing Britannia dismembered, her legs and arms lying about her as she leaned disconsolately against a globe. The lost limbs were labeled Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England; the motto declared “Date Obolum Bellisario,” or “Give a penny to Belisarius,” referring to a Roman general who reduced the provinces to Rome’s rule but was reduced himself to poverty in old age. Franklin had the cartoon printed on cards “on which I have lately wrote all my messages,” he explained to David Hall. His sister Jane Mecom got one, along with a note: “The moral is, that the colonies might be ruined, but that Britain would thereby be maimed.”