Benjamin Franklin by Willard Sterne Randall

Author:Willard Sterne Randall [Willard Sterne Randall and Nancy Nahra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical
ISBN: 9781612306315
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2014-02-26T16:00:00+00:00

It was not to be an auspicious homecoming. During Franklin’s absence, his constituents had routinely returned him each year to his seat in the Pennsylvania Assembly. On returning to Philadelphia, he found growing opposition to his anti-Penn feud. Quaker leaders, usually divided, joined forces to unseat him, dredging up a long-ago slur he had made against the Pennsylvania Germans (whom Franklin had called “Palatine boors”) to turn the German settlers against him. Franklin was drubbed by 1,000 votes, a large margin at the time.

Franklin had lived well in London, hiring a coach and giving lavish dinners for his friends. He had witnessed the zenith of British imperial conquest, the victory over France, and the resplendent coronation of young George III. There was little to compare to this in provincial Philadelphia, yet he tried to console himself by ordering construction of a handsome, three-story house with courtyard and arches. He wouldn’t stay in Philadelphia long enough to see it finished, however.

Soon after his trouncing in the Assembly, his party, openly voting for a change to royal government, sent him back to London as colonial agent. Governor John Penn wrote to relatives in London that Franklin had been like a sorcerer, manipulating members in secret caucuses to accomplish this. Again, Deborah stayed behind.

Franklin returned to an England preoccupied with more important matters than Pennsylvania’s government. The long war with France had mired England in debt. The new government insisted that America, which, after all, had been freed by British arms from the French menace, pay its fair share of the debt. In February 1764, a few weeks before Franklin landed, Treasury Minister George Grenville proposed a Stamp Act in the House of Commons. The measure touched off a year of riots in America and struck a match to the long fuse of revolution. Because he’d recommended two of the three American stamp tax commissioners and several collectors, Franklin was suspected in Pennsylvania of advocating the unpopular measure in the first place. In fact, he had thought it was a good idea at first.

For nine days, his family and friends in Philadelphia had to barricade themselves with guns inside their house on Race Street until the mob’s ardor cooled. Franklin got the message that Americans didn’t like the Stamp Act, shifted his ground, and, more than anyone else, organized pressure in England for the act’s repeal.

As British merchants and manufacturers protested that thousands of workers faced unemployment if American trade continued to decline, Franklin was called to the bar before the House of Commons to testify on behalf of America. Night and day for three weeks he’d been lobbying intensively. He hired a man to hand out cartoons at the entrance of the Commons and wrote a series of articles for his friend William Strahan’s London Chronicle. Now, as the unofficial ambassador of America, Franklin had been called to answer carefully planted questions. For four exhausting hours, he coolly fielded some 170 questions.

During those hours, he gave England’s rulers a rare view of the mind of America, a mental picture that would linger for decades.

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