Benjamin Franklin's Letters to the Press, 1758-1775

This collection of Franklin's political writings contains more than double the number previously recognized as his. Much of this writing was performed during the intensive press campaigns for repeal by parliament of obnoxious measures, such as the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts. His letters reveal the adjustment he was making in his private ideas of British empire and American rights.

Originally published in 1950.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9780807839515

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Benjamin Franklin’s

LETTERS TO THE PRESS

1758—1775

The Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and Colonial Williamsburg, Incorporated

Benjamin Franklin’s

LETTERS TO THE PRESS

1758—1775

Collected and Edited by

VERNER W. CRANE

Published for

THE INSTITUTE OF EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE

at Williamsburg, Virginia

by

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

Copyright, 1950, by

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Manufactured in the United States of America

Van Rees Press, New York

PJ

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY PRINTED.

To

THEODORE RAWSON CRANE

PREFACE

ONLY a scant and haphazard selection of the letters to the press and other newspaper pieces that Benjamin Franklin published (or wrote for publication) as a colonial agent in England, on the eve of the American Revolution, has hitherto been recovered. Since 1779 this has remained the great hiatus in the canon of his contemporaneously printed writings. Of all the editors of his political essays, it was the first, Benjamin Vaughan, working in London during the War of Independence, who took the most pains to gather the papers upon American subjects during the Troubles. But even with Franklin’s aid, by correspondence from Passy, this English editor was frustrated: by the war, and by the fact that Franklin had left his manuscripts in Pennsylvania and other pieces in the keeping of his Tory son. If these could be recovered, he told Vaughan, I think there may be enough to make three more such Volumes, of which a great part would be more interesting.

It was this estimate by Franklin that gave warrant for my studies. Obviously, none of the editors after Vaughan, though they had had access to the surviving Franklin papers, had made a sufficient effort to identify the lost essays. The manuscripts were my first resource; but other complex evidence was also weighed, by methods indicated in the final section of the Introduction. Over ninety new, that is uncollected pieces, of varying length and significance, were thus discovered that could be ascribed more or less certainly to Franklin. They are all reprinted here, with texts derived from the first printing, or from manuscripts when no contemporary printing has been found. So, too, are a few other items that appear in earlier collections with incomplete or otherwise defective texts. The texts are arranged chronologically within an inclusive series of one hundred and forty-one items from the period 1758-75. Most of the previously edited pieces are not textually reproduced, but listed and described in terms of provenience; in such cases references are given to the edition by Albert Henry Smyth, and necessary corrections of Smyth’s texts are furnished in Appendix B. The listed documents include six written in Pennsylvania in 1764. The rest, Doc. Nos. 1-8, 15-141, represent what now can be recovered of Franklin’s political journalism in England. Thus the new essays comprise more than two-thirds of his recognizable writings on politics during his agencies. The greater part are for the first time attributed to his authorship. How firmly, it remains in some instances for later criticism to determine.

So laborious a search could hardly be justified if this edition were the only aim. Elsewhere I propose to examine more completely Franklin’s role as the key figure in Anglo-American relations in the crises that led to revolution. In the Introduction and some of the headnotes I now attempt merely to place the documents in this setting, and to analyse in some detail those features of eighteenth-century journalism that made the newspaper in Franklin’s time a forum for political controversy.

My obligations for aid are many: First of all, to three collectors, the late George Simpson Eddy, most erudite of Franklinists, William Smith Mason and Franklin Bache, each of them a gracious and knowledgeable host. To R. A. Austen-Leigh, who opened to me the Strahan ledgers in his custody in the old printing-house in London. To the librarians of the British Museum, the Library of Congress, and the New York Public Library; of the American Philosophical Society, especially William E. Lingelbach and Gertrude D. Hess; of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, at that time Julian Boyd; of the Yale University Library, especially then Bernhard Knollenberg and R. Malcolm Sills; and of the William L. Clements Library, where I have been cheerfully aided by all members of the staff. To all these for access to their collections and in several cases for permission to print. To the Franklin specialists, in particular the late Max Farrand, J. Bennett Nolan and Carl Van Doren, for materials or counsel; and among historians, for like services, to John R. Alden, Leslie V. Brock, Lawrence H. Gipson, R. A. Humphreys, Edmund S. Morgan. My wife collaborated in reading newspapers in the British Museum and in annotating Doc. Nos. 16, 17. On method I have had the advice of Ronald S. Crane; and Ronald F. Crane tested several essays by another kind of analysis of authorship, with results confirming my arguments. My son, Theodore R. Crane, greatly assisted with collations.

From my University I was fortunate to receive support for the study through leaves of absence and grants from the Rackham Fund and the Faculty Research Fund. Publication was made possible by the co-operation of the Institute of Early American History and Culture with the University of North Carolina Press. I wish now to thank Carl Bridenbaugh, director of the Institute, for his lively interest; and for their exacting technical labors, Lester J. Cappon, the Institute’s editor of publications, and Alice T. Paine of the Press.

VERNER W. CRANE

Ann Arbor, Michigan

INTRODUCTION

Benjamin Franklin’s great services to the American Revolution were performed abroad: as a colonial agent in England, 1757-62, 1764-75, and in later years as a diplomat in Paris. In the decade before the war he had become the acknowledged focal figure in Anglo-American relations: the ambassador, Englishmen sometimes called him, from the colonies to the mother country. In this rôle political journalism was a notable part of his activity. A prolific writer for the press, he was also the American press-agent-in-chief in London. He drew upon talents for journalism that he had developed long since as a provincial printer and newspaper proprietor.

Journalism was one career among the many he pursued that he never entirely gave over. As an apprentice of sixteen he had slipped his first essay under the door of his brother James’s printing shop in Boston. His last letter to the press was composed in 1790 within a few weeks of his death. Nearly everything he wrote that was published in his lifetime—except the scientific papers, the almanacs, and sundry pamphlets—first appeared in a newspaper or a magazine. It now appears that his English political journalism was the largest single body of his contemporaneously published writings.

These political pieces from his English period were none of them treatises, and few of them pamphlets. They were mostly ad hoc arguments in current newspaper debates. As such they were composed within the well established conventions of the journalism of the age.

PROVINCIAL JOURNALIST¹

Like his trade of printing, from which it derived, journalism in America was a cultural importation from the mother country, and in Franklin’s time kept close contact with English journalism. Most printers of early American newspapers were either Englishmen who had emigrated or Americans trained as apprentices or journeymen in English printing-houses. James Franklin had served an apprenticeship at home. Benjamin perfected his skills during his journeyman years in London, 1724-26. David Hall, who became his employee and then his partner in Philadelphia, was sent over by the great London printer, William Strahan. American newspapers imitated the newspapers of London and of the English provincial towns, within bounds set by small capitals, limited circulation, paucity of news. They were all weeklies until late in the century, four-page sheets with occasional supplements. Some English papers also circulated in America, at least among the printers who clipped and pasted their news and literary features to fill out the columns of the colonial gazettes. Along with borrowing there was imitation of English models.

When Franklin arrived in London he had learned a good deal about politics as well as about newspapers. But he had written surprisingly little in his own or other newspapers on purely political themes. His earlier political writings were pamphlets: A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency (1729); Plain Truth (1747); and the essay on population (1751), which was printed with a Boston pamphlet of 1755. They showed skill in argumentation based on principles he had examined in his youth and incorporated into the procedures of his club—principles which he later expounded in several passages of his autobiography—a studied modesty in the statement of his own opinions, avoidance of flat contradiction, the propitiatory approach. He did little pamphleteering of his own in the busy English years, but not a few of his newspaper essays were in organization and method miniature pamphlets.

On the whole he had rather carefully separated his interests as a rising provincial politician from the conduct of his newspaper. In Boston when he was contributing, at first secretly, to the lively New-England Courant, and later in Philadelphia in his writings both for Bradford’s paper and his own, he preferred to engage in satire of manners and conduct, in ethical speculations, and moral and prudential counsels. Like most colonial journalists in that age he began by imitating the Spectator. James Franklin had worked in London when the periodical essayists were lifting journalism above the level of newsmongering; he brought the new journalism to Boston, and with help from John Checkley and William Douglass and young Ben he made the Courant a forum of wit for the town. The Dogood Papers were frankly imitations of Addison and Steele; and the Busy-Body Papers which Joseph Breintnall and Franklin wrote for Andrew Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury in Philadelphia were in the same tradition. Through the years Franklin learned other literary lessons out of libraries, until he had outgrown imitation. Swift was his model for the irony and satire which appear so often in the later political essays. He was learning to write, practising forms and devices which persist from the literary to the political journalism: anecdote, imaginary dialogue, letters composed in invented characters. He was developing a distinctive style, smooth, clear, and short, the style of luminous simplicity praised in later years by an English reviewer.² In 1762 David Hume described him, with a modicum of flattery, as not only the first philosopher but the first great man of letters for whom England was beholden to America.

When after 1729 he conducted his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, he wrote to amuse and to instruct, and also to sell the paper. From James Franklin’s troubles in Boston he had perhaps learned caution. He engaged in no such disputes as marked the Bradford-Zenger newspaper wars in New York. In Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania Journal supported the proprietors, and David Hall swung the Gazette to their camp after he took control. A time came when Franklin’s political allies in the anti-proprietary party found it necessary to set up an organ of their own. This at least was the intention of Joseph Galloway and Thomas Wharton when in 1767 they entered into the unhappy partnership with William Goddard to publish the Pennsylvania Chronicle; and Franklin, then in England, had reason to applaud their enterprise, for it was devoted in part to answering the attacks upon the agent himself. But in his own time as proprietor he had refrained from making the Gazette a party organ. He defined a policy of impartiality in public disputes in his Apology for Printers (1731): Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter. It resembled in principle the open-forum policy which London printers of the 1760’s and 1770’s enforced in their papers—a policy that created for Franklin, as the American advocate, his great opportunity.

The Pennsylvania Gazette was a good newspaper, by the cramped colonial standards. It was no better merely as an intelligencer than the rival Bradford Journal, but Franklin’s contributions made it the best written paper in America. And it was successful. Franklin’s enterprises had a way of succeeding. As a prospering printer he formed connections in the colonies and in England which were serviceable to him later as a political journalist operating in London. Franklin proteges were set up in business in other colonial towns. In their papers, and in the American press generally, there was much reprinting of his London essays. With printers and booksellers in England his standing was well established before his arrival as a colonial agent. In particular he had formed business ties that had grown through correspondence into intimacy with perhaps the greatest British printer of the day, William Strahan.

The coming of an American agent on a special mission was not ordinarily an event to create a stir in London. But Franklin’s arrival in July, 1757, on his mission to negotiate the dispute over the taxation of the proprietors’ lands, was of interest to several groups of Englishmen: to the families of Penns and Calverts, who could foresee no good from his visit; to the scientists of the Crane Court circle who had already greatly honored him as an electrical experimenter; and to his business correspondents. The first night after he was set down in London he spent at Mill Hill with Peter Collinson, Quaker merchant and botanist and like Franklin himself a Fellow of the Royal Society. Next day he received a call from the printer Strahan.

LONDON NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS, 1757-1775³

Since Franklin had last seen London, in 1726, notable developments had occurred in journalism, most of which he had probably observed in his Philadelphia printing house. As a colonial agent he now more than ever surrounded himself with newspapers. In his Craven Street Gazette (1770), a witty parody on court news in the press, he drew a revealing picture for his landlady of the disorder that ensued when she departed for the country: no Care is taken to file the Newspapers; but they lie about in every Room in every Window, and on every Chair, just where the Great Person lays them when he reads them.

What papers, or what varieties of papers, can we assume that he read and carelessly tossed aside? A few weeklies perhaps; tri-weekly (evening) papers in greater numbers; certainly many of the daily (morning) newspapers of London; possibly several provincial sheets; and copies, surely, of the latest gazettes from America. These were the main varieties of news-sheets that had evolved since the seventeenth century from older corantos, diurnalls, and intelligencers. They still preserved differences in size, typography, and content which must have interested the Philadelphia printer. They were all recognizable as newspapers in the primary sense. But they had added other features—essays, letters to the press, paragraphs—which made them journals of opinion as well as of news (or rumor). Franklin probably read most of them. But when he wrote for the press he sent his contributions chiefly to one evening paper and to two or three London dailies.

At first, indeed, he wrote only for The London Chronicle; or, Universal Evening Post, founded this same year of 1757. It was printed thrice a week in the best style for J. Wilkie, bookseller, by William Strahan. Strahan was the principal shareholder as well as the printer of the Chronicle, and for many years took an active part in its direction. Over their dinners and their cribbidge he and Franklin became great cronies; their friendship outlasted their political sympathies. Strahan printed most of the American pamphlets which Franklin promoted in London, and as a partner in several papers besides the Chronicle served as his chief link with London journalism. In September, 1758, he printed in the Chronicle what appears to be the first political paper that Franklin wrote in London.⁴ During the first and second agencies thirty items here attributed to Franklin had their first printing in that excellent newspaper.

Evening papers of Chronicle type flourished from the early eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth, largely on their country circulations. They were printed, usually on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, in time to catch the inland posts. They had readers in London also, and a good many subscribers in America. They all reprinted freely from the dailies and from each other, and in this way Franklin essays, among others, achieved a wider circulation.⁵

On his return to England at the end of 1764 larger issues forced the pace of the American controversies, and henceforth Franklin made constant use of the daily press. From May, 1765, until the repeal of the Stamp Act, only three of his recognized pieces were addressed to Mr. Chronicle, while fifteen came out first in the dailies. These, to be sure, were most of them replies to Grenvillite writers and were naturally addressed to the papers they had used.

Since early in the century Londoners had been provided with daily papers of sorts. In Franklin’s time the daily press derived its salient features from a new type of newspaper which began to appear in the 1730’s and 1740’s, the so-called Advertiser. It was a commercial age, and produced a commercial press; at the same time the rise of factions in politics gave little scope for the old-style party organs of Whigs and Tories. The discovery of advertising was the key to the change. Profits increased; newspapers became joint-stock enterprises; dailies grew into four-page folio sheets, eventually of four columns of print. They found room for ampler country news, and for more and more contributed letters, on a wide range of subjects of current interest, including politics; and they printed contributions impartially on all sides of all controversies. It is true that the original of this type, The Daily Advertiser, remained simply a commercial sheet, but its competitors became rounded journals of news, advertising, and opinion.

Such was clearly the character of the two great dailies to which Franklin in the decade 1765-75 sent most of his political letters. One of these, the Public Advertiser, had been founded in 1734 by Henry Woodfall. It had twice changed its name and in 1760 it came under the direction of the most distinguished member of a famous family of printers, Henry Sampson Woodfall, who made it the finest paper of the day. He is chiefly remembered as the publisher of the Junius letters. He also printed some forty Franklin letters, more than appeared in any other London sheet. Another important medium for political debate was The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser. Since its founding in 1735 it had several times changed its name and even more often its printer. Most of the eighteen Franklin pieces here identified from the Gazetteer appeared before 1769, in Charles Say’s time. Ten were printed during the Stamp Act crisis. Arthur Lee contributed his first series of Junius Americanus letters to the Gazetteer, but later shifted to H. S. Woodfall’s paper.

In the 1770’s perhaps the liveliest medium of political controversy was the Public Ledger, founded in 1760, conducted from 1767 to 1774 by Francis Newbery, and thereafter by Henry Randall. Franklin certainly wrote for the Ledger, but in the badly broken files which survive it has been possible to identify few of his contributions. The Morning Post and the Morning Chronicle were launched late in his English period, and yield no Franklin items.

London had many other papers, but none that could better serve his purposes in American publicity. The Chronicle, the Public Advertiser, the Gazetteer and the Ledger were read in town and country, in clubs and coffee-houses, by Englishmen of most ranks and certainly by politicians. How many readers they reached it is hard to determine. Circulation records are scanty. From the day-books of the Public Advertiser one student has estimated that in 1765 it sold less than two thousand copies daily, but increased to 3,500 when the Junius letters were printing.⁶ The Gazetteer in 1768 claimed to have the largest circulation in London, and in 1769 a printer’s note indicated that it put out five thousand copies daily.⁷ The standard price was fairly high: twopence halfpenny. But there were always many more readers than subscribers. Papers were posted up in the coffee-houses. Franklin satirized the coffee-house politicians, but he also wrote for them. A wealth of satiric allusion in plays and in the press itself bears witness to the newspaper vogue. It was impudence, one writer asserted, for great men to turn up their noses at "News Paper Information, News Paper Arguments, News Paper Politics. While the Solemn Truth is, that to the most of them a News Paper is the very LESSON of the DAY, the source of their small talk and even of their speeches in the political Theatres at Westminster." ⁸

The more striking pieces were reprinted, in full or condensed, from one paper into others, and from newspapers into magazines, repositories, digests. Probably Franklin as much as any controversialist except Junius was served by reprintings, which extended his audience both in England and America. Usually his essays were reprinted on the day, or within the week or month in which they first appeared. A few notable items were revived months and even years later.⁹ It is evident that he had a hand in some of the London reprintings or revivals, especially in 1774, when he was hard pressed.

It is even clearer that he or his American correspondents furnished colonial printers with copies of London papers containing his essays. No systematic attempt has been made in this edition to trace his political writings in all their migrations through the colonial newspapers. But even partial evidence from incomplete files shows that these Franklin reprintings were more frequent than might be expected in the ordinary course of newspaper exchanges. In 1767 and 1768 Goddard’s reprinting of Franklin’s Stamp Act essays and later pieces was part of a campaign to rehabilitate the agent’s damaged reputation in Pennsylvania. It is significant that most of his pieces began their rounds of the American press in Philadelphia papers; or after 1770, when he was appointed to the agency of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, in those of Boston. His correspondence gives evidence of some of the channels he used. Reprintings in America enlarged his influence in defining—on the whole moderately—the issues of the imperial conflict. His own consciousness that he wrote for an audience on both sides of the Atlantic may sometimes have influenced his arguments. Certainly in 1768 he was much aware that he was mediating between opinion in the two countries.

An important supplement to the newspapers was the English monthly magazine, of the type originally set by Edward Cave’s The Gentleman’s Magazine, founded in 1732,¹⁰ and by The London Magazine, begun the next year. Franklin had long been a reader of both periodicals; like other colonial printers he had drawn upon them for filler in his Gazette. In 1741 he had launched his own magazine on the same model, The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for all the British Plantations in America, a short-lived venture. The English magazines contained monthly intelligence, reviews of books, and both original and reprinted essays in science, literature, politics, etc. The Gentleman’s was his favorite: That magazine, he wrote Strahan in 1755, has always been, in my opinion, by far the best.¹¹ Already it had printed Franklin pieces: The Speech of Polly Baker hoax in 1747, and in 1750-51 accounts of his electrical experiments, with an extract from one of his letters to Collinson. (It was Cave who published in 1751 the first pamphlet edition of his Experiments and Observations.) In 1756, the magazine printed both the text of his militia bill, and his Dialogue between X, Y, and Z. Franklin contributed one and perhaps two original essays in 1768; ¹² but most of his English writings which appeared in this periodical were reprintings or extracts or summaries. Occasionally reprintings turn up in other magazines: the London, the Grand Magazine, the Scot’s Magazine. The physiocrats’ periodical in Paris, the Éphémérides du citoyen, included several translations of London essays from his pen.

Franklin essays also occasionally reappeared in the political miscellanies which London booksellers put out: John Almon’s A New and Impartial Collection of Interesting Letters, from the Public Papers, 2 vols., 1767; ¹³ G. Kearsley’s American Gazette, a serial compilation of 1768-69¹⁴ and several of them in the more famous Remembrancer, devoted to American affairs, which John Almon issued in annual volumes from 1774 throughout the war. Others found their way, as appendices, into contemporary pamphlets.

NEWSPAPER POLICIES: THE OPEN FORUM¹⁵

The English newspaper and periodical press provided such a journalist as Franklin with ample scope for political writing—and also with a remarkable freedom of expression. Licensing had long since disappeared; censorship by authority was non-existent. Printers were still restrained from publishing currently the debates at Westminster, and in deference to the law of libel they often enough excluded letters to the press on the ground of scurrility. Otherwise they practiced a generous hospitality toward widely divergent opinions. This policy of the open forum was a great advantage to an American publicist who had often to appeal to English readers in an unpopular cause. If Franklin usually wrote cautiously and mildly it was because it suited his temper and his tactics—not, apparently, because he was constrained by the printers. There is only one complaint of his on record of editorial censorship.¹⁶

The freedom of the press which Woodfall and his colleagues maintained was not the modern freedom of editorial expression, for newspapers printed no editorials during these years. It was a freedom they conferred on their readers to read the arguments on all sides of a dispute; and upon their contributors, the authors of pseudonymous letters to the press and anonymous paragraphs, to carry on their debates. Woodfall proudly described the Public Advertiser as a Cockpit for Political Spurring. The Printer, he declared, looks on himself only as a Purveyor. ¹⁷ The Public Ledger carried the label of "A Daily Political and Commercial Paper, Open to All Parties, but influenced by None." These were high standards, but they were likely set up chiefly for business reasons. The Advertisers, by professing neutrality and at the same time promoting controversy on politics and other matters of current interest, could count on readers of every political complexion.

There were sceptics, to be sure, who doubted the printers’ professions of impartiality. In 1767 George Grenville sourly complained that a letter from South Carolina had been excluded from the newspapers under the Influence of those who have bought those Channels of Public Intelligence. ¹⁸ POOR OLD ENGLAND in 1774 contrasted the English and American press: not a single News paper on the immense Continent of British America, he declared, will admit a bare Paragraph of Expostulation in favour of the Mother Country; while in England, he maintained, the printers were fighting the battle of the rebellious colonies, exhorting them to shake off the just Supremacy of the British Parliament. ¹⁹ Only two months earlier another correspondent had asked the same printer how he and his fellows could justify the constantly printing Essays and Paragraphs, which accuse the Bostonians of Rebellion. H. S. Woodfall used the occasion to defend at length the policy of the open forum.²⁰ Doubtless there was venality in eighteenth-century journalism, as there was venality in politics. Many writers for the press were hired hacks. But the printers lived up measurably well to their professions of impartiality. One need only count the letters pro and con in any important controversy, including the American disputes, to be convinced.

Not that all the outpourings of the controversial writers found their way into print. The printer was still in law, and often in practice, the responsible director of a paper, and he had to protect himself against libel suits. Printers often insisted upon evidence, to be held in confidence, of the identity of pseudonymous writers. Charles Say, in his printer’s notes in the Gazetteer, sometimes assigned no specific reasons for his rejections. H. S. Woodfall exercised, it seems, a more limited discretion. In 1775 he laid down as a standing rule that he endeavours to publish all the Letters he is favoured with as near in Turn as possible. In 1771 he had declared: "The Printer does not plead guilty to the Charge of Partiality. —If twenty Gentlemen write Letters to answer one JUNIUS, the printer inserts these Letters as quick as possible." ²¹

Even so, space was limited. Some among the score of anti-Junius scribes might have to wait upon the printer’s convenience until the controversy had grown cold and was dropped. For it was another newspaper convention that temporary subjects—matters immediately current—always demand a preference. ²²

FRANKLIN’S RELATIONS WITH PRINTERS AND PROPRIETORS

Probably the exercise of the printer’s discretion tended more to preserve than upset the balance of debate. But one suspects that it was an advantage to a writer who hoped to see his piece printed, or at any rate printed promptly, to stand on good terms with printers and newspaper partners.

In an age of pseudonymous journalism, the relations of writer and printer were necessarily confidential. Printers took care to preserve their authors’ secrets by safeguarding their manuscripts. Not to part with Copies is you know a Fundamental Principle with Printers of News Papers, H. S. Woodfall wrote to Caleb Whitefoord, a shareholder in the Public Advertiser. YOU are at any Time welcome to view my Collection of MSS. as a Brother Virtuoso. . . . And you, I hope, believe I should be as scrupulously careful of the MSS. of any Friend of yours. ²³ One of Whitefoord’s friends was his neighbor in Craven Street, Benjamin Franklin. There is evidence that press copies of Franklin contributions to the Public Advertiser sometimes passed through Whitefoord’s hands. In one instance Strahan seems to have violated this Fundamental Principle of the secrecy of manuscripts, for Franklin’s benefit. Press copy of a letter signed A Portugal Merchant, which was printed in the London Chronicle, April 28, 1768, as a reply to one part of an essay by Franklin,²⁴ has been found in the Franklin papers. But this was apparently a special case. Franklin had complained in letters—and likely in conversation with Strahan—that his essay had been unduly censored by the editor, Griffith Jones. Probably he was furnished with the manuscript to convince him that his antagonist had suffered more severely from the copy-pencil, through the excision of his harsher references to F + S.

Franklin was still by courtesy a member of the printer’s guild, and in England he enjoyed personal relations with several printers and proprietors which facilitated his task as an American publicist. Most useful was his intimacy with William Strahan, the Scottish printer who rose to eminence in London.²⁵ Printer of famous books (Johnson’s dictionary, the histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, novels by Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne), in 1770 he acquired by patent a share in the office of King’s Printer. An important part of his business was the printing of periodicals: the London Chronicle, and Ralph Griffiths’ Monthly Review. Strahan was also a substantial shareholder in both morning and evening newspapers, at a time when printers were beginning to yield some of their independence of control to their partners. In the early 1770’s the inventories of his estate included these holdings: the Monthly Review, 1/4 share; the London Chronicle, 1/9; Lloyd’s Evening Post, 1/17; the Ledger, 1/12; the Public Advertiser, 1/20. Thus Strahan furnished a personal link with two of the three papers which Franklin most frequently used, and with the literary review which reflected the kindliest English attitudes toward America, and toward Franklin personally. Franklin had other friendly associations with the Public Advertiser: through Caleb Whitefoord, the wine merchant in the same street, who was also a writer for the press; and probably through Henry S. Woodfall himself. It is noteworthy that all of his newspaper hoaxes in England, and the greatest number of all his newspaper pieces, were printed by Woodfall. It has been more difficult to define his personal relations with the Gazetteer ownership and management. Charles Say was either printer or director of that daily during much of the time when Franklin wrote for it; and it was Say whom he employed in 1774 for a special job of publicity on the Massachusetts agency account.

What particular advantages he reaped from these personal associations must remain a matter of speculation. It seems to be true that most of the letters he drafted for newspaper printing were actually published. Usually they were printed promptly, within a few days of submission, and they were often given prominent display. And it appears that he was put to no expense for their publication: at least his accounts with Massachusetts contain no charges for newspaper publicity.²⁶ It has been difficult to determine just what policies the printers followed in this respect. H. S. Woodfall declared in one of his printer’s notes that The Public Advertiser is open to the Discussion of all public Subjects without Fee or Reward. Yet payment for insertions was certainly demanded in some cases, apparently even at the Public Advertiser office.²⁷

Franklin, one gathers, suffered no handicap as an American when he entered the English newspaper debates. Indeed as the foremost American printer his special relations to English printers probably placed him on a favored footing, and enabled him to employ to the full talents he had developed in American journalism.

LETTERS TO THE PRESS

Three contributed features of the eighteenth-century newspaper served for the propagation of opinion before the development, later in the century, of the modern editorial function: the essays, commonly printed as letters to the press; the paragraphs; and occasionally the extracts of correspondence. The letters to the printer were the most important, both in the whole picture of political journalism and in the practice of Franklin.

Occasionally essays were printed with caption titles. Usually they appeared as anonymous or more often pseudonymous letters, addressed in a standard form, as To the Printer [or Author, or Publisher] of the London Chronicle [or Public Advertiser, etc.]. Sir, . . . Reprinted pieces were generally distinguished from the original printings by the briefer address, To the Printer, but in the Gazetteer this form was used indiscriminately. When for a polemic purpose the letter was addressed to a public figure,²⁸ another heading was used, such as For the Public Advertiser; so too with essays under caption titles.²⁹ Contributed letters appeared in all kinds of newspapers and periodicals. The greater morning papers found room for half-a-dozen or more in each issue. The first letter, printed on the first or second page, occupied the post of honor, distinguished by a factotum (a decorated initial): in the Public Advertiser, the royal arms. Franklin’s letters were often lead-letters, especially when they came out in Strahan’s or H. S. Woodfall’s papers.

The open-forum policy invited a flood of volunteer journalism, but not much writing of real distinction. One notable reputation emerged, that of Junius. Goldsmith, according to Boswell, would not allow even Junius great merit: he was like a flower upon a Dunghill. He appeared in a News-Paper, in which the writing is so bad that his seems very good. ³⁰ Much the same comment might be passed upon Franklin among writers on American subjects in the English press. By Americans, to be sure, Junius Americanus (Arthur Lee) was highly esteemed; but he imitated the renowned Junius at a measurable distance. Franklin possessed a style incomparably superior to Lee’s, and he avoided Lee’s tactics of mingling City politics with American issues. He set out to correct English errors and misapprehensions regarding the colonies, to report American sentiments, to appeal through reason, on grounds of common welfare, to the better nature of imperial Britain.

For these purposes, and for his satirical dissection of British errors of policy and administration when the crises mounted, he found the letter to the press, as long ago he had found the Addisonian essay, a highly flexible instrument. Some of his letters were pamphlets in parvo, and reflected his practice as an American pamphleteer between 1729 and 1764. In this fashion he developed his narratives of the causes of the American disputes, his predictions of the consequences of present measures, his analyses of conflicting arguments, his proposals of means to heal the breach. ³¹ The outline which he drew up for a projected pamphlet in 1766 ³² furnished topical themes which he used again and again in the more soberly argumentative of his letters to the press. Even in this pamphlet convention he often enough employed an ironic method, with the devices of anecdote and colloquy which he had practised in his earlier literary essays.

The variety of forms and rhetorical devices in his letters to the printers is evidence both of ripe experience and a still fresh inventiveness. The argumentative dialogue he had first encountered in the Socratic discourse, and he had used it several times in his Gazette. It reappears in the Conversation on Slavery, ³³ in 1770, and near the end of the period in his better known Dialogue between Britain and Other Powers. ³⁴ There are numerous briefer passages of colloquy inserted in letters framed on other models.³⁵ Perhaps something of the dialogue convention persists in his favorite propaganda device of raising queries, to which answers were either explicitly formulated, or implied in the phrasing of the questions. The numbered list of queries, to be sure, was a common form in letters to the press. His most famous use of the question and answer technique appears in the examination before Commons in 1766, later printed as a pamphlet.³⁶ This might seem a doubtful example of rhetorical method but for the evident fact that many of the questions and answers were concerted in advance of the hearing. Possibly the success of the published Examination suggested the use of something like it in the next repeal campaign. In 1769, Franklin and Strahan, obviously by prearrangement, exchanged letters of query and answer, and circulated them among ministers.³⁷ Not until 1774 did these appear in the newspapers.³⁸ Two of his letters to the press ³⁹ consist entirely of numbered queries, ostensibly addressed to opponents, but framed to lead readers to intended conclusions. Another important letter of 1770 ⁴⁰ is less obviously a questionnaire of this type, but on inspection every sentence turns out to be a leading question.

For all his verbal charm and facility, Franklin was not a literary artist of the first order. He lacked creative imagination. In dialogue he was persuasive but undramatic; there was aptness and humor in his incidental anecdotes (stories of highwaymen abound), but the set pieces of anecdotal character ⁴¹ all fall rather flat. He shared the taste of the times for moral allegory. The three political fables addressed in 1770 to Lord Hillsborough ⁴² have topical interest, and a curious history.

He also shared the taste of eighteenth-century journalists for the hoax. He had launched his almanac in 1732 with the prophecy of Titan Leeds’s death, which has been described as a deliberate echo of Swift’s hoax of a quarter-century before.⁴³ The fictitious speech of Polly Baker, of mysterious provenience, fooled some readers (including Abbe Raynal) for many years.⁴⁴ He wrote other fictitious speeches for political purposes in England which were so labelled.⁴⁵ More clearly a hoax was the fictitious Jesuit chapter ⁴⁶ which Strahan printed in 1761 as propaganda against a weak peace with France. His most famous satirical hoax was, of course, the Edict by the King of Prussia. ⁴⁷ It now appears that the newspaper display of this purported article of intelligence from Dantzig was rather carefully concerted between Franklin and his printer, H. S. Woodfall, who also connived at a number of his other journalistic tricks. Woodfall printed two sets of letters in which Franklin conducted purely fictitious controversies: ⁴⁸ and in 1769 he printed as a genuine letter, perhaps innocently, Franklin’s spurious Extract of a Letter from Paris. ⁴⁹ Franklin did not invent the hoax—along with the lightning-rod and la république, as Balzac asserted ⁵⁰—but in a good cause or from sheer exuberance he was an incorrigible hoaxer. His most flagrant fraud he perpetrated some years later, in France, with his notorious faked supplement of the Boston Independent Chronicle. Conventions of anonymity and pseudonymity facilitated deceptions, which became a kind of game between author and readers. The pseudonym itself was often a mask worn to create a fictitious character.

In his early letters to the American papers Franklin had invented a variety of characters, and he had not lost the knack when he wrote for the English press. His most famous American character was, of course, Poor Richard. The prudential writings in the almanac, and others in the same temper in the Gazette, furnished not a few hints for political letters. Thus the Plan for Raising a Supply of Twelve Millions which Strahan printed in 1758 ⁵¹ followed closely the pattern of Poor Richard’s plan for saving One Hundred Thousand Pounds in the almanac for 1756. The Poor Richard strain also crops out in the rhetoric of the English letters: in the frequent use of illustrative proverbs, and in passages constructed throughout in the cumulative aphoristic manner of Father Abraham’s Speech.⁵² In his prudential and moralizing character he had long delighted to draw up sets of rules: rules for the Junto, rules of conduct, rules for health and long life, rules of success, as in the Advice to a Young Tradesman. It was obviously this same form, turned toward satire, which he revived in 1773 to expose British oppressions in the twenty numbered rules for diminishing a great empire.⁵³ An inveterate projector, he had also used his Gazette to promote projects of civic improvement in Philadelphia. Two letters printed in London papers in 1766 are satirical variations on themes of urban improvement.⁵⁴

Poor Richard was not the whole Franklin. But Franklin had acquired some of the habits of his invented character: among them, a liking for casting up accounts. It is not remarkable that the man who kept books on his own progress in morality also employed a ledger method in political argument. In the Public Advertiser in 1769 he drew up the accounts between The Right Hon. G. G. Esq; and Co. and the Stockholders of Great Britain. ⁵⁵

PSEUDONYMS

Like all writers for the press, and many pamphleteers, Franklin operated behind the screen of pseudonymity. He had special reasons, no doubt, for concealing his hand: his ambiguous position as a crown officer and at the same time a colonial agent (and a petitioner for American lands); his desire to mediate between extremes of position in the two countries; his knowledge that his arguments would carry greater weight if they seemed to come from a less interested source. But in any case he was bound by this convention of the press. A few political pieces that he had special reason for avowing were published in England or America over his name or his well-known initials; ⁵⁶ a few others were anonymous.⁵⁷ The rest were signed with an unusually numerous and varied set of pseudonyms.

The convention of the pseudonym was regulated with some precision by the newspaper printers. In self-protection they usually insisted upon knowing the identity of their pseudonymous writers.⁵⁸ Junius might keep his secret even from Woodfall, but Junius Americanus was not so privileged, or not for long. There are surviving notes between Franklin and two of his printers, Strahan and Woodfall, which show that in those cases—and likely in most others—they knew his identity. At the same time the printers were pledged not to reveal these secrets without permission. Hence Woodfall’s delicacies regarding his manuscripts.

Often enough, to be sure, they printed guesses by other writers, for pseudonymity was a challenge to public curiosity. In 1774 there was a great flurry of speculation regarding SAGITTARIUS, the ministerialist writer who was flaying the Bostonians and their agent in the Public Ledger. One paragrapher pointed the finger at Lord Dartmouth’s Secretary, meaning William Knox; ⁵⁹ but another paragrapher said he was authorized to deny the charge,⁶⁰ which was nevertheless renewed by PROBLEMATIC in the Ledger.⁶¹ Other ministerialist hacks, among them Israel Mauduit, were brought under suspicion before MINOS in the Ledger solved the mystery.⁶² SAGITTARIUS was John Mein, former printer of the Boston Chronicle, the nemesis of the North American Nonimportation, now taking his revenge upon the town that had treated him so harshly. The SAGITTARIUS letters ceased soon after the exposure. Mein had frequently attacked Franklin over this signature, or in the column of Political Speculations in the Ledger; and had often named him as the writer of various pamphlets and letters to the press. Most of his guesses were wide of the mark: for instance, that Franklin wrote the Bishop of St. Asaph’s Speech Intended to have been Spoken (1774), and the newspaper letters by Rationalis and An Old English Merchant. ⁶³ He was right, it seems, in identifying him with FABIUS, ⁶⁴ and perhaps as the translator of certain wretched French rhimes. ⁶⁵

There was another reason for the printers to insist upon knowing their authors: to protect them against piracy of their signatures. For it is clear that the printers recognized and protected a property right in a pseudonym, though disuse for a period was held to forfeit the writer’s equity. H. S. Woodfall in his printer’s notes was explicit upon this important point. Thus in 1770 he announced that he exercised the prerogative of substituting different signatures when new writers took over pseudonyms that were, in some Measure, the Property of old Friends. ⁶⁶ The discovery of this principle supplies important support to some of the arguments presented in this edition for Franklin’s authorship. But the fact that piracies did occur imposes due caution. In one instance Franklin himself seems to have pirated a pseudonym under the eyes of the vigilant printer of the Public Advertiser.⁶⁷

Some ninety pseudonymous items are published or listed in the present edition and attributed more or less positively to Benjamin Franklin. They were written over no fewer than forty-two different signatures.

His procedure, then, was quite unlike that of Junius, who made one signature immortal; or of his own colleague Junius Americanus. Once only, under exigent circumstances, did he publish an essay series of periodical character, in the eleven numbers of The Colonist’s Advocate. ⁶⁸ There were two signatures that he signed as many as ten times: F.B. (his initials reversed), and the stock signature, N.N. (non nominatus). The latter would be of little use to support identifications were it not that for letters on American affairs the printers at this time seem to have reserved it to Franklin. Each of these signatures he used first in Stamp Act days with replies in the Gazetteer to two different Grenvillite writers.⁶⁹ Each of them he used later, in several papers and in pamphlets, with otherwise unconnected essays and prefaces. In a few cases when letters were too long to be printed in a single issue, or when he was writing in an identical character, he repeated the pseudonym he had earlier signed.⁷⁰ As many as twenty-seven of his signatures, however, seem to have been used once and once only.

He had several reasons, probably, for his distinctive practice of multiplying signatures. For one thing, it gave greater security against detection. Not that he was always careful to avoid discovery—he often shared these secrets of authorship with friends, and sometimes planted clues in the signatures themselves, as in Francis Lynn, F.B., and F + S, which Benjamin Vaughan thought meant Franklin’s Seal. He seems to have aimed chiefly at creating an impression that the colonists had numerous champions in the English press. The pseudonyms as in the early literary essays were often devised to establish the character of the suppositious author. It was sometimes a veracious character, An American, A New England-man, or Americanus. More often it was a fictitious character, A Briton, A London Manufacturer, Another Manufacturer of London, Another Merchant, etc. Most of his letters even with less distinctive signatures were written in an assumed English character, as is indicated by his use of we, they, this country and that people. To make the special knowledge they displayed of America agree with this character—for he often