Captaincy, a Kite, and Courtship
William Franklin and His Loyalism Part 3
Amid the threats of skull-crushing by tomahawk, being hacked to heath, and disease, William Franklin won recognition for rising to a testing challenge. In November 1745, French-led Indians burned Saratoga, New York, killing some inhabitants and carrying off others. In August 1746, they attacked Albany. Hunters and men on patrol were killed. William joined the Pennsylvanian Provincial Army and its expedition to Albany that September in response to the assaults from French Canada.1
With his comrades, William wintered in Albany ‘under severe and dangerous conditions, with rusted guns, spoiled beef and cutlasses so soft they would bend and stay bent like wax.’2 In a poorly provisioned, negligently equipped campaign in which sixteen British soldiers were killed in a single Indian ambush, he proved his courage, going on patrol and volunteering to join a march on the French at Saratoga.3 He was rewarded for his efforts with promotion to the rank of captain, the highest provincial rank attainable.
After the building of Fort Ticonderoga, which came at the cost of significant casualties, William left a campaign beset by poor sanitation and diphtheria deaths. He returned to Pennsylvania to round up deserters and drill militiamen before rejoining the action.
In this conflict, sometimes known in America as King George’s War, and more commonly as the War of the Austrian Succession, William won mention for his ‘conspicuous bravery’ in despatches.4
In August 1748, his name was put forward by some war veterans and officers for an expedition to the Ohio Country to form an alliance with the Native American Miami Nation.5 The mission was a success, and a peace treaty was agreed and based partly on the willingness of George II ‘to provide weapons fit to crack the Frenchmen’s skulls.’6
The prodigiousness of the vast wilderness of the Ohio Country, its fecundity, and its potential for settlement endured with William. He would be part of an initiative that had at the heart of its design this ‘colossus in the green vistas and panoramas of the Ohio Valley cut with silver streams, the canvas and many-coloured palette upon which his generation would paint the picture of American prosperity’.7
Britain and France agreed to end the war in 1748. They signed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle which restored territories conquered during the fighting, leaving large colonial questions unanswered.8 This peace, combined with a lack of funds, suitable social standing with which to purchase a commission in the military, and according to historian William Sterne Randall, his father Benjamin Franklin’s intent to spend his own money on himself, rather than offer a gift or lend a hefty sum to William, have been presented as reasons for the curtailment of his promising military career.9 Randall’s claim that Benjamin’s stinginess ended William’s military ambition is not supported with evidence.
While there does not appear just cause to attribute William’s promotion to the rank of Captain to nepotism, his appointments to the positions of Postmaster of Philadelphia and Comptroller of the North American Postal Service may be indicative of some favouritism.10 In 1753 Benjamin was appointed joint Deputy Postmaster General of British America, he subsequently made William Comptroller.11 William discharged his duties capably.12
By 1752, Benjamin had long been a self-made businessman. In addition to his entrepreneurial success, he served as Clerk of the General Assembly of the Pennsylvania Colonial Government between 1736-1750. In 1751, he was elected a member of the Colonial Assembly representing Philadelphia City. He then bequeathed his post of Assembly Clerk to William.13 Aside from proving himself a fine soldier and adept officer in the British American government, William was of much utility in assisting his father’s scientific experiments and was part of a demonstration that catapulted his father to international stardom.
In Philadelphia during the summer of 1752, Benjamin enlisted William to help fly a silk kite with a sharp wire protruding from its top and a key attached near the base of a wet spring so that a wire could be brought near it in an effort to draw sparks. Benjamin put his knuckle to the key and was able to draw sparks. He collected some of the charge in a Leyden jar and found it had the same qualities as electricity produced in a lab. The ‘sameness of electrical matter with that of lightning’ was ‘completely discovered’.14 That summer, lightning rods invented Franklin were erected in Philadelphia to safely conduct electricity and such rods sprouted across the American colonies and Europe.15
Walter Isaacson reasons we should not ‘underestimate the practical significance of proving that lightning, once a deadly mystery, was a form of electricity that could be tamed. Few scientific discoveries have been of such immediate service to humanity’. 16 Harvard and Yale universities awarded Benjamin Franklin honorary degrees in the summer of 1753. He became the first person living outside of Britain to receive the British Royal Society’s Copley Medal.17
William’s role in the experiment has been immortalised by a nineteenth-century Currier and Ives print that depicts him as a small boy rather than the twenty-two-year-old man he was at the time the kite flew.18
A year after the famous experiment, it was William, when charting the course of a lightning bolt that struck a three-story house, who found that the visible electrical charge of lightning moved from the ground up in the instance he inspected, and not the clouds down as is so often the case. He wrote a detailed account of this event to his father.
In addition to proving worthy of his father’s political patronage and a capable assistant for his scientific activities, William accompanied Benjamin on an expedition in December 1755 when the latter was appointed by Governor Morris to a three-man commission on a defensive mission to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, following more violence along the frontier. The son of a politician, scientist, and colonel, served alongside his father.19 Benjamin noted, ‘‘my son who had in the preceding war been an officer in the army raised against Canada, was my aide-de-camp, and of great use to me’’.20 The fortification of the frontier was a success.
While William was away, Elizabeth Graeme was worried about his safety. Elizabeth was at this time courting William, and in her, he had found a match he shared intellectual interests with. The relationship also represented the prospect of social advancement for him if it could be ratified by marriage.
Elizabeth was a striking debutante and daughter of Dr Thomas Graeme, a prosperous physician, and advisor to the Proprietors of Pennsylvania. Her mother, Ann Diggs, was an aristocrat. Elizabeth was raised in two homes, one a house in Philadelphia and the other an elegant stone mansion twenty miles north in Horsham, Pennsylvania. She would go on to become a renowned writer, one of the most learned women in America.21
One elite setting the couple enjoyed was the Philadelphia Dancing Assembly, an institution William had helped found between 1748-1749. It was here that the upper echelons of Pennsylvanian society would meet for social dancing.22 William furthered his courtship here. He mixed with the upper class. The progression of his career, not to mention the burgeoning renown of his father, meant that he was becoming a notable figure, and one highly regarded. He was intelligent, charming, and noticed for his looks.
William had a successful professional relationship with Benjamin as well as a close personal one. It is around this time we can detect some variance in the disposition of the younger Franklin when compared to that of his father. William’s associations placed him in more genteel company, and he became an active member of the Anglican Church. Benjamin was nominally Presbyterian, though definitely not known for any avowed Christian belief.23 There appeared a very healthy balance. Benjamin had guided his son and aided his progress and William had been allowed to become his own man.
William was happy with Elizabeth. However, politics threatened the relationship. And to understand why, it is necessary to explore the fabric of Pennsylvanian politics and the colony’s governance under its proprietors, the Penn family.
The next piece in this series will look at Pennsylvanian politics, governance of the colony during the mid-eighteenth century, and its relation to the Franklins. Subscribe below to receive the article in your inbox on the 1st of March.
William Sterne Randall, A Little Revenge: Benjamin Franklin and his Son, 1984, 54
Daniel Mark Epstein, The Loyal Son: The War in Benjamin Franklin’s House, 2018, 12
Sheila Skemp, Benjamin and William Franklin: father and son, patriot and loyalist, 1994, 14
Randall, 54
Epstein, 13
Ibid 14
Ibid
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "King George's War". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Jan. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/event/King-Georges-War. Accessed 13 January 2022.
Randall, 55-56: Epstein, 12: Skemp, 14
Skemp, 18
“Commission to James Parker as Comptroller of the Post Office, 22 April 1757,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-07-02-0082. Accessed 13 January 2022
Randall, 64
Ibid
Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, 2003, 140
Ibid, 143
Ibid, 144-145
Ibid, 143
Isaacson, 140
Epstein, 30-34
Ibid, 33
Ibid, 42
Randall, 102-103: Zara Anishanslin, Dancing Assembly, The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, 2017, Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia | Dancing Assembly (philadelphiaencyclopedia.org) Accessed 15 January 2022: The Assemblies of Philadelphia in the Eighteenth Century, AmericanRevolution.org, 2014-2020, Dancing Assemblies of Philadelphia (americanrevolution.org)
Randall, 102