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Benjamin Franklin

<h2>9 THE STAMP ACT</h2> His ship, the King of Prussia, reached Portsmouth in just thirty days. By December 11, 1764, he was ensconced once more at 7 Craven Street, in the tender care of Polly and Mrs. Stevenson, exuberant to have their kind American friend with them once more. How pleasant to be spoiled by them, to resume his dinners at the Royal Society, his meetings with his scientific colleagues, to see again his many English acquaintances! In respect to his mission, his return was less satisfactory. The Penn family was as influential as ever. For nearly two years, their scheming prevented him from getting the Assembly petition so much as a hearing by the King’s Privy Council. When at last, in November 1766, the hearing was granted, the answer was short and decisive: the King had no power to interfere with the rights of the proprietors of a province. The petition was denied. Franklin tried in vain to have the decision reversed. The proprietors officially retained their claims on Pennsylvania for ten years more, until the events of 1776 changed the whole structure of the American provinces. An even more urgent crisis retained him in London. Lord George Grenville, the same who had so blatantly stated that the King’s word was law in the colonies, was now chief adviser to George III. His situation was precarious and he knew that his cabinet was doomed if he failed to raise some money. And where would one find money if not by taxing the American colonies? Since the Americans had no representation in Parliament, no votes would be lost even should the colonists grumble at being taxed. So Grenville reasoned, and it was thus that he conceived foisting the Stamp Act on the colonies. The Act was to tax some fifty-five articles, including all legal papers, advertisements, and marriage licenses. A liquor license required a tax of four pounds; a pack of cards, one shilling; a pair of dice, ten shillings. A newspaper on a half-sheet of paper must carry a stamp worth one half-penny. A civil appointment worth more than twenty pounds a year took a four-pound tax. A college degree cost two pounds in taxes. Grenville called the colonial agents together and discussed his brainstorm with them. The money raised, he assured them, would be used in America—for public works and for the maintenance of British troops to protect them. If they had any better idea for levying taxes, they should tell him. The agents, Franklin among them, could only point out that no taxes would be popular; that if Parliament needed money, the proper procedure was to ask the Assemblies to raise what they could. Their objections were ignored. Politically, America was then in disfavor. The English held that the seven-year struggle with France, with its huge expenditure in lives and money, had saved the thirteen colonies from French tyranny. They should be grateful. They should want to help reduce the national debt. Instead they were always clamoring for something or other. In quick succession the Stamp Act passed the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and was approved by the King on March 22, 1765, scheduled to go into effect on November 1. Franklin felt that a bad mistake had been made, but that, since the Stamp Act was now a law, it should be obeyed until a way was found to get it repealed. To an American friend he wrote that he opposed it “sincerely and heartily.” He added philosophically, “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.” Grenville summoned Franklin to a conference. Was it not a good idea to appoint Americans as stamp officers to distribute the stamps, so that the colonists could deal with their own? Did Franklin have anyone to suggest? Franklin proposed two—John Hughes of Pennsylvania, who needed a job, and Jared Ingersoll, agent for Connecticut. Somehow it did not occur to him that he was throwing himself open to criticism at home. An attack of gout kept him in bed for some time after the passage of the Act. He amused himself with one of his hoaxes, a letter to the newspapers mocking certain alleged economists who claimed that the colonies could never be self-supporting. In America, he wrote, the “very tails of the American sheep are so laden with wool, that each has a little car or wagon on four little wheels, to support and keep it from trailing on the ground.” Wool was so cheap and plentiful that colonists spread it on the floors of the horses’ stalls instead of straw. He next described a mythical “cod and whale fishery” on the Great Lakes. Did people imagine that cod and whale lived only in salt water? They should know how cod fled from whales into any safe water, salt or fresh, and how the whales pursued them: “The grand leap of the whale in the chase up the falls of Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in nature.” Soon all London was chuckling about the whale that leaped up the Niagara. In the meantime a tempest was erupting in America. The Stamp Act which Franklin had taken so calmly had evoked a clamor throughout the colonies, loudest in New England and Virginia. At the House of Burgesses in lovely Williamsburg, an eloquent young Virginian named Patrick Henry rose to declare the act “illegal, unconstitutional, and unjust,” and to spout a set of resolutions, defining the rights of colonists as British subjects, as had never been done so effectively. The Virginia Resolves were printed in all the colonial newspapers, setting aflame a smoldering indignation. A new organization, the Sons of Liberty, held parades and protest meetings. Franklin was plainly shocked. “The rashness of the Assembly in Virginia is amazing,” he wrote John Hughes, his appointee as stamp officer. “A firm loyalty to the Crown ... will always be the wisest course.” The stupid Lord Grenville had been succeeded in July by the Marquis of Rockingham. Franklin was hopeful he could be persuaded of the folly and injustice of the tax. All that was needed was patience. But the word patience had no appeal in America. When the names of the stamp officers were published in August, riots broke out from New Hampshire to South Carolina. Mobs gathered in front of the house of John Hughes, burning him in effigy, threatening him with hanging and drowning, until he was forced to resign. Similar demonstrations forced resignations from Jared Ingersoll and other stamp officers. By the time the stamps arrived, there were almost no officers to distribute them. As a further measure, the colonists began to boycott British goods, to the sorrow of the British merchants who henceforth became the most ardent advocates of repeal. The Penn supporters took advantage of the fray to point out that it was Lord Grenville who was responsible for the hated act—not the proprietors. As for Benjamin Franklin, everyone in England knew he was on excellent terms with Grenville. In the stormy atmosphere, exaggeration mounted to falsehood. Soon people were saying that Franklin had framed the act, helped to get it passed, and accepted pay for recommending the stamp officers. Debby became marked as the wife of the man who had betrayed his trust, and old friends slighted her on the street. There were rumblings about burning their handsome new home. Governor William Franklin worriedly came to try to persuade her and Sally to take refuge with him in New Jersey. She let Sally go but refused to budge herself. Cool-headedly and courageously, she collected guns and ammunition and enough provisions to see her through a siege. Her brother came to stay with her as did one of Franklin’s nephews. The house was turned into an arsenal. But no attacks were made. In her heart Debby was sure there would be none. Why should anyone want to hurt her or Pappy? The object of this fury was in that very period working tirelessly to achieve repeal by peaceful means. “I was extremely busy,” he wrote Lord Kames, “attending members of both Houses, informing, explaining, consulting, disputing, in a continual hurry from morning to night.” He conferred with leading statesmen, such as Lord Dartmouth, so much respected in America that a college was named for him. He dined with the Minister Lord Rockingham, and found an ally in Rockingham’s private secretary, a gifted Irishman named Edmund Burke. He sought out the manufacturers and merchants who were suffering from the American boycott, and enlisted their support. He wrote letters to newspapers to convince England’s common people that the Stamp Act was a major obstacle to Anglo-American friendship. He used his charm, his wit, his power of persuasion, his writing talents, his high reputation as a scientist, all as weapons to win friends for the American cause. The other colonial agents worked with him, but none could equal his activities. The news from America saddened him and he knew he had to fight, not only to save his own prestige, but to preserve what then seemed to him terribly important—the harmony between the colonists and the Crown. Finally, in February 1766, there was a breakthrough in the wall of seeming indifference. The House of Commons summoned him to answer questions of the probable effects of the Stamp Act in America. He was dead with fatigue and troubled with gout, but inwardly he was jubilant. He had coached his friends in Parliament in advance on what to ask, and guessed without difficulty the line of inquiry of the opposition. “What is your name and place of abode?” the Speaker asked first. “Franklin of Philadelphia,” he said, as if there were no need to be more explicit. For three hours the questions rained down on him. He answered fully, drawing from his vast knowledge of American affairs. As he spoke in his dry quiet voice, peering at the House members over his spectacles, he gave the impression of a schoolmaster instructing a group of students. “Do the Americans pay any considerable taxes among themselves?” asked James Hewitt, Member for Coventry, a town that manufactured the worsteds and ribbons which the colonists had stopped buying. They paid many and heavy taxes, Franklin said. He enumerated them precisely, stressing the debt contracted in the recent war, stressing too that people of the frontier counties were so impoverished by enemy raids they could contribute nothing. “From the thinness of the back settlements, would not the Stamp Act be extremely inconvenient to the inhabitants?” This was certainly a question he had formulated himself. It definitely would, Franklin said. “Many of the inhabitants could not get stamps when they had occasion for them without taking long journeys and spending perhaps three or four pounds that the Crown might get sixpence.” There were many more questions and then the Stamp Act’s creator, Lord Grenville, asked sharply, “Do you think it right that America should be protected by this country and pay no part of the expense?” “That is not the case,” Franklin told them. “The colonies raised, clothed, and paid, during the last war, near 25,000 men and spent many millions.” Though they were supposed to be reimbursed by Parliament, in actual fact they received only a small part of their expenses. “Pennsylvania, in particular, disbursed about 500,000 pounds and the reimbursements in the whole did not exceed 60,000 pounds.” He had at his fingertips equally factual data on every subject that arose. Someone asked, “Do you not think the people of America would submit to pay the stamp duty if it was moderated?” “No, never,” Franklin stated, “unless compelled by force of arms.” Another asked, “What was the temper of America toward Great Britain before the year 1763?” He replied, “The best in the world. They submitted willingly to the government of the Crown, and paid, in all their courts, obedience to the acts of Parliament.... They had not only a respect but an affection for Great Britain.” “And what is their temper now?” he was asked. “Oh, very much altered,” he assured them. “What used to be the pride of the Americans?” “To indulge in the fashions and manufactures of Great Britain.” “What is now their pride?” “To wear their old clothes over again till they can make new ones,” he said calmly. The session ended with this verbal blow leaving them gasping. He had never considered himself a public speaker, and never before or after spoken so long before such a large audience, but he had won his point. In less than a month, on March 8, the Stamp Act repeal had passed both houses of Parliament and received the reluctant assent of the King. Franklin’s “Examination” was published in London, and later that year in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Williamsburg, and elsewhere in the colonies. It was translated into French and German. It was a wonderful victory. There was rejoicing throughout America. Philadelphia coffeehouses made gifts to the crew of the ship that brought the news. Taverns served punch and beer on the house. Benjamin Franklin was once more a hero. Even the Penn supporters had to admit he had done a fine job. At the Philadelphia State House, 300 guests of the governor and the mayor drank a toast to him. Franklin’s own celebration was to go shopping. With Mrs. Stevenson to guide him, he bought more presents for his wife and Sally—fourteen yards of Pompadour satin for a new gown, a silk negligee, a petticoat of “brocaded lutestring,” a Turkish carpet, crimson mohair for curtains, three damask tablecloths, and a box of “three fine cheeses.” “Perhaps a bit of them may be left when I come home,” he wrote hopefully to Debby. He had asked the Pennsylvania Assembly to let him come home but instead they appointed him agent for another year. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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