Flight of the Eagle. Conrad Black
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(In them, Franklin again, as he often had before, wrote that “The inhabitants of this country, in all probability, in a few years, will be more numerous than those of Great Britain and Ireland together.” This was the core of Franklin’s belief that America was sure to win.1
On January 29, 1774, the Privy Council summoned Franklin to be present to hear discussion of the Massachusetts Assembly’s petition, and Franklin stood poker-faced, expressionless, while he was subjected to a vitriolic attack from the solicitor general of Great Britain, Alexander Wedderburn. The petition was rejected as “groundless, vexatious, and scandalous and calculated only for the seditious Purpose of keeping up a Spirit of Clamour and Discontent.”2 Two days later, Franklin was sacked as deputy postmaster general of America. Franklin retired as agent for Massachusetts, but continued for Pennsylvania. He demonstrated admirable repose of manner and was calm and courteous throughout this difficult time. His serenity was doubtless fortified by his long-held prediction of what would come and his unshakeable conviction that America was predestined to surpass Great Britain and all other nations of the world.
Parliament’s response to the Boston Tea Party—the Intolerable Acts (or the Coercive Acts, as they were known in Britain)—substantially not only closed the Port of Boston and reduced the powers of the Massachusetts Assembly, it purportedly banned town meetings, curtailed trial by jury in the colony, and declared that British troops must be stationed in Boston and billeted and paid for by the locals at the whim of the commander of the troops. Franklin denounced the acts for provoking war with the colonies, “for a war it will be, as a national Cause when it is in fact only a ministerial one.”3
Despite his many British friends, and the esteem in which he was held there, Franklin was also seen by the arch-imperialists as the evil visionary who transmitted messages back and forth with America, always twisting them toward increased disharmony. This was not a fair allegation and was essentially a famous case of blaming the messenger. Abrasive spirits were skyrocketing on both sides. Franklin proposed compensation of the East India Company for its loss of tea, and of Boston for the closing of the port, without success in either case.
In the autumn of 1774, the ban on town meetings was generally ignored, and what were known as “Resolves” were adopted in Massachusetts and delivered by the talented horseman Paul Revere to the Continental Congress meeting in Philadelphia, on September 18. They called for civil disobedience, dissolution of the courts, seizure of the money of the colonial government in Massachusetts, and intensive preparation for war. The Congress balked at this as too provocative, but prepared a bill of rights virtually seceding from the British jurisdiction and demanded an airtight boycott of all British goods. A petition to the king to uphold the colonies’ side in the dispute was also included. A reintroduction of Franklin’s Albany plan for inter-colonial parliamentary union was voted down as too much resembling the over-powerful Parliament against which they were virtually in revolt.
In August 1774, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, who had not been accessible to Franklin during the Seven Years’ War, though his chief secretaries were and they knew each other indirectly, called upon Franklin. They met again on December 26, right after Franklin had received and sent on to Chatham the Continental Congress resolutions. Chatham declared that the Congress had acted with such “Temper, Moderation, and Wisdom,” that it was “the most honourable Assembly of Statesmen since those of the ancient Greeks and Romans in the most virtuous times.” Chatham spoke in the House of Lords on January 20, 1775, ostentatiously greeting and speaking with Franklin in the lobby of the House and advocated withdrawal of British troops from Massachusetts, appointment of a commission to negotiate a settlement, and a general de-escalation. He feared for destruction of the Empire he had largely built and saw as clearly as Franklin did where the present course would shortly lead.
Chatham presented his bill to the House of Lords on January 29, 1775. It restricted Parliament’s right to legislate in America to matters of trade, made any taxation in America conditional on consent of the taxed, and recognized the Continental Congress. All British statutes that the Congress had objected to from 1764 to 1774 were to be suspended or repealed. The ministry attacked it as the insidious work of Franklin, as if Britain’s greatest living statesman were a mere mouthpiece. Chatham replied that the bill was his own, but that were he charged to resolve the mess the government and its predecessors had created, he would not hesitate to consult the man “whom all Europe held in high Estimation for his Knowledge and Wisdom, and ranked with our Boyles and Newtons, who was an Honour not to the English Nation only, but to Human Nature.”4
Such high praise from so great a man in so eminent a place indicated Franklin’s unique standing as the premier American in the world, but Chatham’s bill was vituperatively rejected. Franklin assimilated the praise as expressionlessly as he had endured being reviled the year before by the same objectors. This was the end, and he left a few weeks later and arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775. The die was cast.
2. THE OUTBREAK OF WAR
On April 19, 1775, American militiamen and British Redcoats exchanged fire at Lexington and Concord, outside Boston, and the British conducted a ragged retreat back into Boston, harried by American irregulars sniping and skirmishing. The war had begun, though sequels were a time in coming. The Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia just after Franklin’s return to that city; formed, at least theoretically, a Continental Army (of the Massachusetts militia and six additional companies the Congress thought it could dispatch); and drafted Colonel George Washington, as the ranking British officer among Americans (who attended the Congress in the old blue uniform he had worn for his official portrait), and by now a committed imperial secessionist, as its commander.
John Adams (of Massachusetts) had proposed him, which gave something of a national character to his commission. Washington, in his previous career, had not been a particularly successful commanding officer, though he understood logistics and the basic requirements of leadership and had been conspicuously courageous. He had earned the respect of all by his sober demeanor and imposing appearance. He said he was unworthy of the honor, and declined to be paid, apart from his expenses. He was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies because of his astute management of his plantation, adding little factories to provide what the escalation of the boycott against Britain had required to be manufactured domestically. And British victories over the French now assured a steady inflow of settlers and appreciating land values in the Ohio country where he had been a very astute acquirer of land.
George Washington the semi-autodidact, the unsuccessful striver for a British army commission and combat glory, had made himself, by default as well as by his own distinguished bearing, the custodian of the hopes of a new country. To his wife and others, Washington wrote that he could not decline the draft of the Continental Congress to command the Continental Army; that to have done so would have caused censure to rain down upon him, for cowardice, fecklessness, and betrayal. Thus was born the mighty myth of the disinterested Cincinnatus, the unseeking officer and country squire summoned from his bucolic and familial pleasures to take in hand the cause of human liberty. Fortunately for the whole project, the propagation of its motives was to be chiefly in the hands of one of the most adept spin-doctors of world history in Thomas Jefferson.
Washington proceeded to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to take command of the minimalist, but grandiosely titled, Continental Army, ostensibly a force of 17,000. If he succeeded, he would be the father of a new and predestined nation. If he failed, he was running some risk of being hanged as a traitor. He had seen the ineptitude of British forces in America, except when they had overwhelming numbers, and he had certainly seen the insufferable incompetence and arrogance of British colonial administration, and shared Franklin’s view of the golden future of America. Britain’s greatest statesmen, Chatham (Pitt), Burke, and Fox, were in sympathy with the American project. In one of his greatest Demosthenean oratorical triumphs, Burke urged an almost spellbound but dissentient Parliament to “keep the poor, giddy, thoughtless people of our country from plunging headlong into this impious war.”5
John Adams forged what would prove the axis of the first administration of the new state and the basis of what became the Federalist Party by being the chief propagator of the Washington legend. None of the general’s (as he shortly became) successors in the great office he would hold and establish