CONCLUSION
Segmented Serpent
The pace of Franklin’s narrative slows dramatically as he pieces together his account of the busy years between 1751, when he and Thomas Bond collaborate on building a hospital, and 1757, when he sails to England as the Pennsylvania Assembly’s agent in its case at court against Thomas Penn. The bulk of the 1788 fragment of the memoir focuses on events that fall between the Carlisle treaty meeting in the autumn of 1753 and the immediate aftermath of the Braddock disaster a little over two years later. Franklin does not keep careful track of this month-by-month progression of incidents, and at several points in the story he appears to jumble names and meetings into confusion. The chronology is tightly coiled together, difficult to unravel, and even so it remains incomplete. In the course of discussing the Albany meeting and his plan of colonial union, Franklin never mentions the segmented serpent emblem and its provocative motto, “Join, or Die.”1
The imperfect command of dates and details that this portion of his story displays is almost certainly a result of age and poor health, as well as a byproduct of the extraordinary experiences that had filled the intervening decades. Franklin had a great deal to remember and to reflect upon in the closing months of his life. The opening stages of the Seven Years’ War were more than thirty years in the past when Franklin began to reconstruct them. Nearly sixteen years of lobbying on behalf of the colonies in England, followed by nearly a decade of intense diplomatic activity in France, six ocean voyages, key roles in two continental conventions, and the associated personal and political stresses of a great revolution had all intervened to entangle the process of recollection. Even so the serpent emblem makes its presence felt in a variety of subtle ways during the closing pages of Franklin’s book, not as a static political exhortation or an instrument of policy but as a figurative model for the devious paths of history. In sharing his apprehensions with General Braddock, as the expedition’s baggage train was slowly taking shape, Franklin pictured the movement of the English army through the Pennsylvania woods as a variation on the serpent’s image.2
“Join, or Die,” cartoon, The Pennsylvania Gazette, May 9, 1754.
After listening carefully to the general’s ambitious plans for driving the French from the Ohio Valley in a four-month campaign, Franklin voiced his concerns:
To be sure, Sir, if you arrive well before Duquesne, with these fine Troops so well provided with Artillery, that Place, not yet compleatly fortified, and as we hear with no very strong Garrison, can probably make but a short Resistance. The only Danger I apprehend of Obstruction to your March, is from Ambuscades of Indians, who by constant Practice are dextrous in laying and executing them. And the slender Line near four Miles long, which your Army must make, may expose it to be attack’d by Surprize in its Flanks, and to be cut like a Thread into several Pieces, which from their Distance cannot come up in time to support each other. (A, 224)
An ambush is a tactical device, a tool that the Indians are “dextrous” in using, like the techniques they employ for keeping their gunlocks dry during weather that drenches Franklin’s small militia detachment as it marches toward the massacre site at Gnadenhütten, or the charcoal pits that they dig for security and warmth as they watch Franklin’s men build a frontier stockade. Many years earlier, Josiah Franklin had taught his restless son to admire and, eventually, to adapt just such skills to the construction of his own little machines. Constant practice and growing dexterity are equally applicable to the hypothetical problem of dismantling an army trying to wend its way through the wilderness, a challenge that Franklin cannot resist addressing, on the Indians’ behalf, in this exchange with General Braddock.
The attack ultimately takes a different form from what Franklin had envisioned: not the surgical cutting of a slender thread, but the slaughter of soldiers “crowded together in a Huddle” and helpless without the guidance of their mounted officers, who had been “pick’d out as Marks” very early in the battle “and fell very fast” (A, 225). Remove the serpent’s head, these Indian marksmen might have observed, and chaos results. But that ruthless lesson is not the implication of Franklin’s emblem. Each segment of the serpent in his 1754 drawing is also an independent whole and in some instances more than a whole. From New England at one end to South Carolina at the other, the image is a map, a list, and a subtle form of prophecy, depicting the positions of separate communities, for the most part with separate governments, stretching from north to south along the North American seaboard.
In Franklin’s day, this distance leaves the colonies too divided to support one another very readily in a common catastrophe, but the image suggests that each has a measure of self-sufficiency that equips it to survive on its own, and all are sufficiently attentive to their immediate neighbors to maintain a degree of sympathetic cohesion as a single political creature. The serpent’s tail is a blank, not a menacing rattle, inviting the viewer to pencil in a new name, Georgia, which had just shed its status as a trustee province in 1752 to become a royal colony within a year or two of Franklin’s drawing. Other blanks might succeed this one, with other names sketched in as the continental organism grew.
Franklin had visited most of these linked communities as deputy postmaster general—a title he had just assumed in 1753, the year before devising his emblem—and over his lifetime had played various roles in their affairs. He had financed the establishment of the first printer in South Carolina, prepared paper money for New Jersey, contributed to building an orphanage in Georgia, negotiated for cannon with New York, and been born and bred in Massachusetts, the chief member of a northeastern coalition that had considerable experience acting in concert to accomplish common goals. This northerly portion of the segmented serpent, at least, has already “joined” itself into the collective entity “New England,” a dimension to Franklin’s drawing that probably reflects his awareness of the experiments in confederation that the New England colonies had implemented, on various occasions, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.3 An attentive reader of Franklin’s provocative cartoon, however, would not need to be well versed in history to note that his serpent is already changing: fusing together at one end and growing at the other, even in the absence of effective continental institutions to guide the design. It depicts a variety of social and temporal movements, as well as a geographic and political predicament.
This appreciation for the mixed significance of his emblem—its simultaneous embrace of several ongoing stories at once—lies behind the dismay that Franklin experiences when he encounters the dogmatic inflexibility of the English authorities whom he meets in the opening months of his long residence abroad. The final section of the memoir offers a brief glimpse of this experience. After a frustratingly slow departure for England as Pennsylvania’s new colonial agent, followed by a harrowing adventure at sea, Franklin had barely settled into his London lodgings in 1757 when Lord Granville, the president of the Privy Council, arranged to see him so that Granville could deliver a lecture on the doctrines of imperial government, as he and his ministerial colleagues understood them. Acting as his own secretary, Franklin preserves Granville’s words, as he does the speech of many other individuals, both prominent and obscure, in the course of telling his story:
“You Americans have wrong Ideas of the Nature of your Constitution; you contend that the King’s Instructions to his Governors are not Laws, and think yourselves at Liberty to regard or disregard them at your own Discretion. But those Instructions are not like the Pocket Instructions given to a Minister going abroad, for regulating his Conduct in some trifling Point of Ceremony. They are first drawn up by Judges learned in the Laws; they are then considered, debated and perhaps amended in Council, after which they are signed by the King. They are then so far as relates to you, the Law of the Land; for THE KING IS THE LEGISLATOR OF THE COLONIES.” (A, 261)
As far as the Americans are concerned, Granville argues, the body politic is a startling creature indeed: all royal head with very little need to consult other influential members of the Atlantic community, once England’s learned judges, its counselors, and its king have had their say. “This was new Doctrine to me,” Franklin noted in the memoir’s closing pages, “I wrote it down as soon as I return’d to my Lodgings,” anticipating the many written hints and records that would prove useful in the devious negotiations of the 1775 voyage letter.
But Granville’s dismissive attitude is not so new to Franklin’s reader. Edward Braddock had spoken in very similar terms of the unchallenged excellence of the king’s regular troops, in contrast to the unprofessional colonial militia, and had displayed much the same indifference as Granville did to the importance of American advice. Four decades earlier, Josiah Franklin had thought it necessary to engage his twelve-year-old son’s private inclinations in the momentous apprenticeship decision that he proposed for the boy. By contrast, as Granville portrays the imperial organism, the king and his Privy Council operate entirely without parliamentary involvement in governing the colonies and recognize no role for American inclinations at all. These circumstances seem suggestively similar to the near-fatal blindness that almost ends Franklin’s diplomatic career before it had begun. A bow watchman on the packet ship carrying him to England was apparently so sleepy that despite many warnings to “Look well out before, there,” he had failed to see a lighthouse signal marking the treacherous rocks off the Scilly Isles (A, 258). The packet captain was sound asleep, and only the quick action of another sea captain who was a passenger on the vessel prevented a wreck. “This Deliverance impress’d me strongly with the Utility of Lighthouses,” Franklin drily remarks, but even a warning light “as big as a Cart Wheel” (the memoir implies) is useless if the watchman is asleep. This incident, like many in Franklin’s book, quickly becomes a prophetic emblem for his diplomatic experience.
In the memoir’s account, Franklin’s first exchanges with Thomas and Richard Penn are every bit as unpromising as his encounter with Lord Granville. John Fothergill plays the role of intermediary in arranging this meeting too, with no more success than he will have eighteen years later, as he and David Barclay convey Franklin’s conciliatory “hints” to members of Parliament who hope to prevent civil war. In 1757, Franklin discovers, the Penns are not in a conciliatory mood. “The Conversation at first consisted of mutual Declarations of Disposition to reasonable Accommodation,” he notes in his book, “but I suppose each Party had its own Ideas of what should be meant by reasonable” (A, 262). The wording echoes Franklin’s account of the conveniences of being a reasonable creature when the savory odor of fried cod first begins to erode the principles of a young runaway apprentice. At this initial meeting with the Penns, a clash between reasonable creatures quickly ensues, with the proprietors refusing to respond at all to “the Heads of our Complaints in Writing” that Franklin had prepared, and Franklin in turn refusing to discuss the complaints with legal agents but only with the Penns themselves. The parties reach an impasse over the proprietors’ insistence that Franklin had shown an offensive “want of Formality” in his dealings with them, though they eventually consent to a single taxation act by the Pennsylvania Assembly when Lord Mansfield, the king’s chief justice, unexpectedly mediates a compromise.
This development proves to be a perfect application of Franklin’s longstanding conviction “that Truth, Sincerity and Integrity in Dealings between Man and Man, were of the utmost Importance to the Felicity of Life,” the lesson he had learned from the collapse of his early infatuation with Deism (A, 114). While lawyers for the Assembly and the Penns were arguing their positions before the Privy Council, Mansfield beckoned Franklin into a nearby clerk’s chamber “and ask’d me if I was really of Opinion that no Injury would be done the Proprietary Estate in the Execution of the Act. I said, Certainly. Then says he, you can have little Objection to enter into an Engagement to assure that Point. I answer’d None at all” (A, 266). In the informal confines of the clerk’s chamber, a simple “certainly,” not a deferential “certainly, my lord,” will do. Franklin’s personal assurance proves good enough for Mansfield, much as a similar engagement on Franklin’s part did for the Pennsylvania farmers who supplied wagons to Braddock’s army a few years earlier. A written agreement is quickly drafted, and the Penns are forced for the time being to stifle their resentments.
These events bring Franklin’s manuscript to a close. Had he lived to carry the narrative forward, through the genealogical trip that he and William took in 1758, the honorary degree from St. Andrews, his brief return to America in 1762, followed by a second mission to England and ending with the 1774 Privy Council experience, a far more complex sequence of disappointments and triumphs would have emerged, eventually arriving at Benjamin Vaughan’s adulatory letter on the threshold of Franklin’s departure from Paris at the end of the American Revolution. But the author of the memoir would have faced peculiar difficulties in writing about events involving many living witnesses to his conduct whose views of Franklin’s performance would almost certainly have differed from his own. He would have confronted, as well, unusual temptations to make “Reprisals on my Adversaries,” as the memoir admitted he was once tempted to do. And a discussion of his diplomatic career in England or his reception later by the French would have provided opportunities to gratify his vanity that few writers would have had the strength to resist.
Instead, Franklin compresses the full trajectory of his life story—from obscurity to fame, ridicule to praise—into the handful of pages that the memoir devotes to describing the circuitous growth of his scientific reputation. Manuscript evidence suggests that along with the memoir’s account of the Pennsylvania hospital bill, and its treatment of the “trifling Matters” of paving and street cleaning, these are among the last passages of the book that Franklin wrote, probably sometime in the early months of 1789, before illness forced him to put the memoir aside.4 Early in 1790, Franklin would add six paragraphs to the book, describing his negotiations with Lord Mansfield and the Penns, but the belated description of his interest in electricity, immediately following the Braddock episodes, has a scope and completeness that few other portions of the story can match. The account Franklin offers of “the Rise and Progress of my Philosophical Reputation” echoes the wording of his opening sentences so closely as to suggest that he intends this segment of the narrative serpent to echo the whole.
The story begins, as the memoir does, with the feelings of surprise and pleasure that Franklin experiences not in discovering little anecdotes of his Ecton ancestors but in first witnessing Archibald Spencer’s electrical demonstrations during a trip to Boston in 1743. Shortly thereafter, Peter Collinson sends to the Library Company a glass tube for collecting charges of static electricity, along with a description of how to use this piece of apparatus to conduct simple experiments. Franklin quickly puts the pieces together: Collinson’s tube and the procedures he describes, Spencer’s Boston exhibits that Franklin learns to repeat, and a few new electrical demonstrations of Franklin’s own devising—all of which he practices performing at his home for delighted audiences “who came to see these new Wonders” (A, 241):
To divide a little this Incumbrance among my Friends, I caused a Number of similar Tubes to be blown at our Glass-House, with which they furnish’d themselves, so that we had at length several Performers. Among these the principal was Mr. Kinnersley, an ingenious Neighbour, who being out of Business, I encouraged to undertake showing the Experiments for Money, and drew up for him two Lectures, in which the Experiments were rang’d in such Order and accompanied with Explanations in such Method, as that the foregoing should assist in Comprehending the following. He procur’d an elegant Apparatus for the purpose, in which all the little Machines that I had roughly made for myself, were nicely form’d by Instrument-makers. His Lectures were well attended and gave great Satisfaction; and after some time he went thro’ the Colonies exhibiting them in every capital Town, and pick’d up some Money. (A, 241-42)
This account too is a narrative adaptation, in several phases, of the segmented serpent: Franklin first divides the experimental burden by duplicating Collinson’s original tube several times over and distributing the copies among Philadelphia’s electrical “Performers”; the lectures that he prepares for Kinnersley’s use are ranged in a supportive sequence that ties the little machines together, like the portions of his 1754 cartoon; Kinnersley in turn becomes an itinerant lecturer, diffusing satisfaction through “every capital Town” of the colonies that the serpent emblem depicts, a common currency of interest that mimics the movement of the electric “fluid” that had originally captured Franklin’s attention.
While Kinnersley goes on the road, his mentor goes to his desk and writes several letters to Collinson that describe “our Success” at using the glass tube that Collinson had sent, but these reports (unlike the original gift) meet with a mixed reception in England. When Collinson reads them to the Royal Society, the members dismiss Franklin’s results as unworthy of appearing in the society’s transactions. One of the members later writes him that his speculation “on the Sameness of Lightning with Electricity … was laught at by the Connoisseurs” (A, 242). This initial response repeats Braddock’s patronizing amusement at Franklin’s military advice and anticipates the scorn that the Penns express for his provincial rudeness, but Collinson and Fothergill arrange for Franklin’s letters to appear as a published pamphlet that grows “by the Additions that arriv’d afterwards” to “a Quarto Volume, which has had five Editions” (A, 243). Segment by segment, letter by letter, the treatise that establishes Franklin’s international reputation acquires scope and consequence, becoming both a scientific triumph and yet another similitude for the communities depicted in the serpent emblem, whose curiosity, ingenuity, and energy Franklin’s letters embody.
An initial ambivalence similar to the ridicule of the Royal Society greets Franklin’s work in France, charged with a degree of national as well as metropolitan resentment. The memoir charts this process as well, with particular care to note the vindication of modest diffidence that it provides. The Count de Buffon, a prominent admirer of Franklin’s quarto volume, has the Experiments and Observations on Electricity translated into French, but the memoir records that the Abbé Nollet, “an able Experimenter, who had form’d and publish’d a Theory of Electricity which then had the general Vogue,” resented this scientific competitor: “He could not at first believe that such a Work came from America,” Franklin wrote, “and said it must have been fabricated by his Enemies at Paris, to decry his System” (A, 243). Once Nollet is convinced of his rival’s existence, he tries to ignite a published dispute between them that Franklin declines to join, “believing it was better to spend what time I could spare from public Business in making new Experiments, than in Disputing about those already made” (A, 244). The outcome, Franklin reports, “gave me no Cause to repent my Silence.” Other experimenters defend Franklin’s book and oversee its translation into Italian, German, and Latin, until its “Doctrine” is “universally adopted by the Philosophers of Europe,” while Nollet “liv’d to see himself the last of his Sect” (A, 244).
These incidents too give Franklin a chance to revisit many of the critical lessons of his story: his appreciation for the social value of silence and for the pervasive presence of vanity in human affairs, his wary view of sectarian blindness and the futility of disputes, his faith in the impact of associations as agents of change. The clash with Nollet echoes and recasts General Braddock’s curious faith in the unshakable “validity” of English troops and anticipates Franklin’s dismay at Lord Granville’s stifling legal theory that the king was the Legislator of the Colonies. In time, the so-called Philadelphia Experiments would subdue all opposition; other investigators repeated Franklin’s success at “procuring Lightning from the Clouds.” The Royal Society named him a member, waived his dues, and awarded him “the Gold Medal of Sir Godfrey Copley for the year 1753,” a turning point in imperial history as well as in Franklin’s personal life, less than a year before the rejection of the Albany Plan of Union and the arrival of Edward Braddock’s troops would set in motion the events that ultimately led to revolution.
Franklin scrupulously records the complete formal name of the Copley prize in his memoir, relishes the society’s decision to waive his twenty-five-guinea membership fee, and takes note of the “very handsome Speech of the President Lord Macclesfield,” in conferring the medal, “wherein I was highly honoured” (A, 246). The feeling of vindication must have been particularly gratifying in light of the thirty-five eventful years that had passed since Lord Macclesfield spoke. This scientific triumph forms a perfect counterweight to Franklin’s public humiliation before the Privy Council in 1774, to the attacks leveled at his character from the floor of the House of Lords a year later, or to Richard Howe’s bald attempts at bribery as Franklin is preparing to leave England in the spring of 1775—a final instance of the figurative scales that the memoir imposes on so much of Franklin’s experience. In 1771 as he began to write his book, he had candidly admitted that in doing so he could at least indulge the natural “Inclination” of an old man to reflect upon his past. Eighteen years later, as Franklin looks back on his scientific legacy and adds a few more sentences to a manuscript that he will never live to finish, he takes comfort from this final interplay between the trifling satisfactions and great accomplishments of his life.
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