The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin by Gordon S. Wood

Author:Gordon S. Wood [Wood, Gordon S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780143035282
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

A VERY PERSONAL AFFAIR

Some of Franklin’s anger and passion against British officialdom may have been calculated, but not all by any means. The Revolution was a very personal matter for Franklin, more personal perhaps than it was for any other Revolutionary leader. Because of the pride he took in his reasonableness and in his ability to control his passions, his deep anger at the British government becomes all the more remarkable, but ultimately understandable. Franklin had invested much more of himself in the British Empire than the other patriot leaders. He had had all his hopes of becoming an important player in that empire thwarted by the officials of the British government, and he had been personally humiliated by them as none of the other patriots had been. Although he kept telling his correspondents that he made “it a Rule not to mix personal Resentments with Public Business,” there is little doubt that his participation in the Revolution was an unusually private affair.15

Because he had identified himself so closely with the empire, he took every attack by the British government on the American part of that empire as a personal affront. He was hurt and bitter over the way the British ministers had treated him. He blamed them for prosecuting him “with a frivolous Chancery suit” in the name of William Whately over his role in the affair of the Hutchinson letters, a suit that his lawyer told him would certainly lead to his imprisonment if he appeared again in England. He believed that Britain’s bombardment of Falmouth (Portland), Maine, and its apparent intention to do the same to America’s other coastal towns were designed to hurt him personally; for “my American Property,” he reminded his English friends, “consists chiefly of Houses in our Seaport Towns.”16

Although legally he was still a member of the British Empire in 1775, emotionally he was not. He was way out ahead of many of his countrymen in his belief in the certainty of independence. And he had left his English friends even farther behind. Although his English friends kept imploring him to work out some kind of reconciliation, he now knew that all such efforts were futile. Of course, he continued to write warm and tender letters to Britain, yet he jarringly juxtaposed statements of affection toward his correspondents with severe criticisms of the nation of which they were a part. He began a letter to John Sargent, his banker in London, with accounts of the ways “your Ministry” had begun to burn “our Seaport Towns”; but he ended the letter with “My Love to Mrs. Sargent and your Sons ... [and] with sincere Esteem, and the most grateful Sense of your long continu’d Friendship.” For all his English friends it was now “your Nation,” “your Ministers,” and “your Ships of War” and for his fellow Americans and himself “our Seaport Towns,” “our Sea Coast,” and “our Liberties.”17

One senses the mixed feelings he had in writing to some of his best friends about the impossibility of reconciliation.

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