Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia and Paris

We continue with Benjamin Franklin and it’s difficult to conceive at this period in American history what we’re continuing with. The atrophying of the sense of what the American tradition has proceeded apace to the point now that Franklin is totally misunderstood and misrepresented. And as a consequence the entire history of the United States is misunderstood and misrepresented.

For instance, out of TIME magazine, just this current issue – January 14th, 1985 – closing out a review on a new book called A Little Revenge: Benjamin Franklin and His Son. The reviewer, to four and a half million readers around the world, concludes, “Perhaps it is just as well that Benjamin Franklin is not beside George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on the slopes of Mount Rushmore” after all. He describes him as, “puffy and smooth from gout, his body overweight and rounded into the peculiar barrel shape of the once-powerful swimmer too long out of the water.” See how you do when you are 85.

[From audience] Yeah you won’t do very well.

The difficulty is not only that the ignorance is so rampant, but that the irresponsibility is in control. This is a dangerous situation and the danger comes and is exacerbated by the habituation to games – the use of astrology, the use of tarot, the use of the manipulation of images to make models of human behavior, which at the best still need to be interpreted in terms of life, still have to be understood in terms of historical development, still have to be played into the universe as it actually exists. For the universe is the space, and history is the time. And in this time-space we must find our being.

In these patterns of events there are large structures that come into play. Now, people glibly talk today in colloquia throughout the motel lobbies and convention halls of the world about archetypes. Archetypes are not phantasmal images that someone imagines is in the sky somewhere, or in somebody’s psyche somewhere, they play themselves out in terms of millions and hundreds of millions of lives and hundreds of years. The fact that these patterns actually obtain, have sobered our species for a good long while. And it’s only in periods of exotic decay like our own time that he does not pay. Franklin is one of the most masterful individuals in world history. He is one of the few individuals who understood the play of what is so glibly called archetypal energy, that it is of a transcendental order that it elicits from us subconscious responses that a lot of the drama plays on levels that we have no conscious control over, except to respond. We may consciously respond and only through patterning our conscious response to come into synchronization with the larger deeper issues do we achieve a sense of reality and only with that can we do anything for real.

In Italy in the 15th century what Jacob Burckhardt called the Renaissance, the key to that all was Cosimo de Medici choosing Ficino to organize a school where the golden thread of timeless wisdom could be reborn and taught again. And out of that little workshop of the heart, out of that little villa up in the hills above Florence, came a small steady stream of scholars and learners and students throughout all of Europe and this revitalization carried itself through two centuries of variation, of complication, of mutation, experiment, and this whole massive development called the Hermetic Renaissance, came together in the great minds of Leibniz and Newton. And at the close of that great experiment occurs Benjamin Franklin as the only individual of that time – we’re speaking of the 1720s and 1730s – who had a feel a flair a touch a response of openness adequate to this tremendous energizing of the human potential that had occurred. For the Renaissance had not only provoked and brought along with it its polarity – the Reformation – but they had formed a synthesis called the enlightenment, and the colossal intelligence that had been called forth from the archetypal depths of human nature putting into play into man’s subconscious subtleties which had not been seen since ancient Alexandria, were called forth and were loose and needed to have a pattern within which they could work. Elsewise man was heading for a self-electrocution; you cannot call forth such powers with impunity. They come and they must be used with intelligence and purpose. Our own time has seen the price that is paid when one tries to be mediocre in a condition of calling forth cosmic powers.

Franklin’s mind is the interface of the great minds of Leibniz and Newton. He inherits the tremendous capacity to be reasonable; not to guess and compromise, not by guess and by golly, not that kind of reasonable. But for someone for whom intelligence is a directed purposive learner, who addresses himself to unknowns and through patient experiment and record and review and retrospection, slowly puts together a workable relation to whatever field of endeavor has presented itself. One of Franklin’s little maxims that he would put in italics occasionally was that, “given enough time the mouse gnaws the cable.” And this is a key to the scale of Franklin’s personality.

Of all the intellectual geniuses of his time, perhaps none in philosophic circles has acquired such a reputation for poignancy as David Hume, the author of the Treatise on human understanding. And Hume again and again in his letters to Franklin takes off his hat and salutes him not only as the first great sage of the New World, but as the most comprehensive mind of his time. Franklin is not on Mount Rushmore because of a total misunderstanding of history – our history. Franklin’s writings haven’t even been collected yet, almost 300 years after his birth. They’re still unfinished in publication. The American Philosophical Society and Yale will probably finish sometime before the century is out.

Where have they been all this time? Why were they for more than a hundred years relegated to tied up bundles, like old newspapers, lying on the back shelf of a laundry in London? Because they are dynamite. Because they pull the plug on the power structures that rely upon habituation and illusion for their own occurrence. And without men like Franklin, it’s easy to perpetuate. With Franklin we come to a new scale of human intelligence. One that had not been seen probably since the mind of Plato. The capacity to hold in suspension all of human life, all of its vulgarities, its vicissitudes, its expectations. Not only one human life, but hundreds of intelligent human lives. Franklin’s correspondence was with all of the great individuals of his time. He was like Ficino again, the one man to whom the intelligence of the Western world came to a focus. They came like compatriots; they came like students; they came like children. And as Franklin grew in capacity and stature it was apparent, more and more, to the English power structure that he was the key. That with Franklin handled the colonies in the New World would be subject to the control of the British aristocracy.

That portion of the British aristocracy which were committed, much like a portion of the giant international corporations today, committed to keeping themselves in control. Not to make money ostensibly, but to keep control. When one has control, money is no problem. And so it is a power struggle. And power in this sense is a structure built upon rule. And those who control the rules make the game work. Opposed to power on this scale, in this profundity, is the notion of right. That there is beyond the rule of law a phenomenon known as justice, and that whereas a rule of law seeks to control, by precedent and victory, justice seeks to discover truth, and its method is by right. And to Franklin’s mind human nature in its spiritual poignancy is a timeless condition of quest for right in the universe; that man deserves by his own being to experience the presence and the quality of truth. Whatever that entails, so be it. This scale of mind dwarfs the intelligence of the limited British aristocracy that at this time was setting up a worldwide empire.

When we review for ourselves how few there are to review, the Boston Tea Party – which we’ll get to in a moment – where was that tea coming from? That tea was coming from India because the British East India Company had been set up, and control had been assured in India, and using this leverage of the control of the continent of India, England wanted to extend this arm of power to the whole North American continent. They had just achieved a victory over the French. They had just driven the French from Canada. The great fishing banks of Labrador and Newfoundland had come into British hands but half of the fighting force were Americans, colonialists in their ships. And they had fought side by side. And the French and Indian Wars had produced an uneasy partnership between the colonies for this control of the wealth of North America, and those individuals who were setting up international corporations at that time like the British East India Company. And it was a fight for power. But on that level the colonialists would never have won. The United States would never have been born. Of the few individuals who understood at the time Franklin was the only one mobile enough in reality to conceive of the whole issue, in terms of right, in terms of justice, in terms of truth, in terms of the great experiment of life to bring into being a new world, a world where millions of men and women would be free, liberated in the sense of being able to live out their own lives as they chose, to enter into associations as they chose, to dream dreams and purposes of their own making, and not to have all of their energies endeavors precut and pre-channeled into power structures that had turned sour ages ago in Europe. This was the issue.

One of the great power moves was the Stamp Act. It was not going to be a source of great revenue but it was a source of great power and control, because in order to do anything – to get married, to take out a business license, to go to a church, to buy anything – you would have to have a stamp, minuscule in price, but it was like putting the mark of Cain on every human activity. And it was Franklin’s mind who understood the evil of this intent. And it was Franklin in London who pursued a course, rather like Mother Nature, fanning out subtly to dozens and dozens of individuals making the links and connections that only a master jeweler understanding human nature in a grand way could have done and brought together slowly, personally, individually, alone, the coalition of individuals and ideas and purposes that got the Stamp Act repealed. The fact that the Stamp Act was repealed in 1765 caused a tremendous consternation, an earthquake of fearfulness, in the power centers of the oncoming British Empire. They wanted to know: Who is this man? How does he do this? So they do what they have always done and hopefully few of us will ever have to go through the situation. Those of us who have can testify to the kind of intimidation, fearfulness, that comes up. They take you to a small quiet room and set you before a panel and they examine you. Well we call it examination, but the purpose is dissection.

The examination of Doctor Benjamin Franklin happened in the British House of Commons in 1766 the following season. We have a complete report in Franklin’s own handwritings of the occurrences that occurs in the fourth volume of the federal edition of the Works of Franklin. This is the only complete edition of Franklin’s works that is extant. It came out in 1904 in an edition of 1000 copies. That’s hardly enough to ensure the passing on of the great American tradition, but we have to work with what we have. I’ll read you the last few lines of Franklin’s accounting – person by person, question by question, answer by answer – of the entire event because Franklin’s style was to make available to the common man, to the citizen, the scenario of actually what happened, sans interpretation, simply to give the information freely and openly. It’s what the Americans now call, putting the cards on the table. And in terms of international diplomacy in 1766 this was unheard of. You don’t consult the common man. You don’t even consult the whole aristocracy. Those who make the power happen might consult each other, but you don’t consult others, especially the insignificant common man.

Part of the American Revolution was the way in which Franklin handled the whole affair. He made everything completely public. He not only wrote letters to hundreds of individuals he put out scores of pamphlets. And whenever there was a crucial situation, he had recorded as best as possible by himself – he trained himself his whole life to hear what was said both by someone else and by himself not to crowd his mind so as to get into the way but to train himself to be perfectly open so as to hear what is being said. What is it that I am saying? How is this reply, this conversation going on? This is British empiricism at its finest. This is why someone like David Hume, or someone like Condorcet, rearranged their wigs and stood up straight when Franklin came in the room. Because he was the most enlightened man of the Enlightenment. He was on a scale that the giants of the age respected. No he’s not on Mount Rushmore. You’d probably have to go to Mount Everest to find a place to put Doctor Franklin’s face.

Of course you know Franklin was very wise about life. He used to use the British sailor proverb occasionally when times got tough. The proverb is, “God sends meat, the devil sends cooks.” Life is a problem. It’s going to continue to be a problem. If we get upset over the fact that life is a problem we’re not going to be able to live rationally. When they brought Franklin in, this is the last few sentences.

“Would it be most for the interest of Great Britain, to employ the hands of Virginia in tobacco, or in manufactures?”
“In tobacco to be sure.”
“What used to be the pride of the Americans?”
“To indulge in the fashions and manufacturers of Great Britain.”
“[and] What is now their pride?”
“To wear their old clothes over again, till they can make new ones.”

The trend, recognizable, because Gandhi used the same technique in the 20th century against the same people against the same mentality. If we don’t use their manufacturers, if we get used to getting over the feeling of ridicule because we’re not keeping up, it’s the first step to a metanoia, of turning around not only in our minds but in our lives, and starting to see that we need to make what we have to use to live ourselves. And we find in Franklin’s massive correspondence, it runs already to 24 or 25 volumes from Yale (800 pages apiece). We find him constantly seeking out through his worldwide contacts to find out, Where is the best silk? How do we get the best silk culture into the colonies? He wrote in one of these correspondences he said you know the Italian silk is always yellow, but the Chinese highest quality silk is white. He said it took me a long time to discover that the reason for this is that the Chinese prune their trees because when the mulberry trees are left to grow full height the silkworms eating these kinds of leaves produce a yellow silk. But if you prune the trees constantly and keep them into a medium size, the silk will be pure white, and you can die it any color you want. So he got those kinds of cocoons. He had to go through several different countries and many different individuals. A friend of his was Captain Cook, incidentally. He had ships searching the world for various items. He was trying to bring the basics in and acclimate a whole population to the notion that they were free, indeed, to make a kind of a life for themselves and whatever they wish to dream, whatever they wish to add to that life, they could out of their own endeavor and not have to import it.

Now the most important commodity of a– individual people needed to survive is the sense of self-esteem which comes from experiencing a sense of personal liberty. In fact, the first of the rebel groups in the New World, called themselves Sons of Liberty.

[Comment from the audience/room:] Excuse me a second. What is it that you wish? Sorry. We’re looking for Larry Evans. Is there another lecture in the building or somewhere here? There is not. I’m sorry to interrupt. I’m sorry. Thank you. His son dislocated. His shoulder is in the hospital. Okay.

Franklin’s method was to make everything open, and so he arranged to have most of these long interviews, these long pamphlets, printed in public magazines. His examination appeared in Gentleman’s Magazine in July 1767, so that the entire British public also was being informed by Franklin, not only the American to be public, but the British public. And because Franklin, as you recall in the previous three lectures, had established himself as an internationally famous scientist all of these writings were quickly translated into French, and French was the lingua franca of the time – that’s what that phrase means. It was the diplomatic language of all of Europe. And so Franklin’s works were followed by an international audience. And very quickly he realized that the focus of the wider audience was the French language, that the French people especially were paying attention to Franklin. It became apparent that something in the English mind, the English mass mind, something archetypally activated in the English mind was purposely misunderstanding Franklin. And that very same thing in its polarity, in the French popular mind, was understanding Franklin. And where it was above and beyond anyone to match which– wits with someone like Voltaire and where someone like Diderot was just a little bit too wild and and too avant-garde. Someone like Benjamin Franklin was the subject of conversation in many streets and households and taverns throughout Paris, throughout France, throughout the world at that time. He was the common man’s sage to come back to Gandhi in our own time to get an idea of what a figure like this commands in terms of unexpressed unrepresented power. That’s how it’s seen by the competition.

In order to break this kind of power you have to discredit the man. And a lot of the rumors about Franklin come, and still circulate. Those power structures are still alive. Very much so. They make a lot of money. They control the world. But Franklin’s mind controlled something else. It controlled a way of opening up new capacities that had not been seen before, and thus there were new men, new women, coming up and this was Franklin’s fondest regard, that all we have to do in our time is hold pace with the evil that is here in the world, and that if we keep the open experiment of intelligence circulating, man in his best nature will eventually win, because he will always be able to learn how to deal with the problem. Franklin, writing to Joseph Priestley in the autumn of 1775 when everything was irreparably torn, he wrote to Priestley and he said– Priestley of course the discoverer of oxygen. Franklin was in on that correspondence in that discovery of oxygen. He wrote to Priestley on October 3rd 1775. He said:

“Dear Sir,
…Tell our good friend Doctor Price, who sometimes has his doubts and despondencies about our firmness, that America is determined and unanimous; a very few tories and placemen excepted, who will probably soon export themselves. Britain, at the expense of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees [in] this campaign, which is about £20,000 a head; and at Bunker’s Hill she gained a mile of ground, [and] half of which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During this same time 60,000 children have been born in America.”

It’s the same argument that Jefferson will use with Napoleon when he has his Secretary of State inform Napoleon that if he wants to fight the United States for– from the base of the Louisiana Territories, Jefferson has provided him with a total census, not of fighting men, but of all the French peoples in the New World. They came to about 20,000 people. And he said I am sending 30,000 of people a month through the Cumberland Gap. And if you want a power play with us we’re ready.

It’s this kind of comprehensiveness of seeing what the scale of reality is, of being able to habituate yourself to the games, and to – I think the phrase is, “tune in” to actually what is occurring in the scale of what we call reality. And it was this capacity in Franklin that was most foremost in his mind. The very first person who ever mooted the next step from the 13 colonies was Franklin. He’s the first one to moot in his mind the inescapable conclusion that there were going to be more colonies. And of course if there’s going to be one more then there’s going to be who knows how many more. And he began to envision the tremendous potential that a whole continent would have.

You know about this same time they discovered New Zealand, which is the size of Great Britain, and Franklin took note that there were land masses the size of England being discovered almost every day that the land position the real estate position of the British Empire was already outdated by its own activities of expansion that it was an inevitable occurrence. The first colony, new colony, that Franklin mooted in his mind was Illinois. And it was interesting because Illinois became the focus for Franklin’s vision of America. And it was this vision, incidentally– one of the visions that he passed on to Jefferson. You know during the Revolutionary War, when everybody was fighting from New England down to South Carolina, Jefferson made sure that funds were made available, under the counsel of Franklin, for George Rogers Clark to take a force and go over the Alleghenies and go down the Ohio River all the way to the juncture of the Mississippi, and to take command and control of Illinois, because it was the terminus au plan at that time. It was as far as the mind could conceivably reach, because beyond the Mississippi was the wilderness of America, still held by the Indian tribes. But up to the Mississippi there were no effective Indian tribal grants.

Why is this so? The only place in the world that we can find that information is in the writings of Benjamin Franklin. It’s the only place it occurs. No one else thought to discover why that condition was. Why is all this land mass, two and a half million square acres, available with almost nobody in it, depopulated, fertile. Why was this? And Franklin investigated, and he found that in 1664, after the Restoration, very secretively wealthy British munitions firms began shipping armaments – rifles, powder, handguns – to the Iroquois Confederation. the Six Nations, and from 1664 to 1763 the Six Nations, The Iroquois League, decimated all of the Indian tribes up to the Mississippi. Because they had a military structure based upon British garrison training and drilling they had guns and they took over all of the territory and decimated the tribes. And that of course is when the French and English came into competition to see who was going to control the Iroquois.

And when Franklin found this information and communicated it to the colonies he meant them to understand also that they’ll do the same thing to us. We’re the next Indians on the list. We don’t have any choice, he would say again and again. Or rather we do have a choice. It’s not a choice of being still British citizens, it’s a choice between being slaves and being free, because they’re not going to give us any other choice than this. They’re not going to share power because they can’t. The only thing that can be shared among men, really, is right, is justice. That can be shared among men, but not power. Power has to be concentrated to be effective, and it has to be in control to be real. And if you try and share power, you end up losing everything yourself.

So Franklin’s idea, Franklin’s whole regard was, not to build a power structure to fight a power structure, but to build a sense of right and justice to fight that power structure; that if we adopt the same techniques that they did, we’re going to just become more British Empire builders ourselves. And so the problem was colossal. How to fight to gain, not a victory, but a new world based on right, based on justice, based on liberty. And this was a very poignant problem. And Franklin was the only individual of this time who was able to conceive this much less execute this.

We’re going to take a break in just a moment but I want to bring one individual in just as an example for you of the way in which– and we have to understand this now. Franklin worked in one of the most comprehensive ways that a man of this scale works, is to prepare for those successors who are going to succeed him when he goes. You have to be able to pass that on, not the passing on of power so much, but the passing on of the understanding of the rights and the basis of justice and liberty that ensures those rights. So the problem is to find at least one other person who can carry this on when you’re gone. Franklin, for many many years, depended upon his son, William, up until his 69th year. Then he realized that the lure of money and security and power had insidiously worked its way into his own family, into his own son, who had been governor of the colony of New Jersey for twelve years. And he realized this was gone. He was heartbroken. And that’s when he began to hear about Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson, as we’ll see, is the inheritor of the mind, the technique, the heartfulness, of Benjamin Franklin. It is Jefferson who amplifies this and makes, actually, the United States of Franklin’s dreams. Because, we’ll see in a couple of weeks, that the really big revolution in the United States was the one of 1800 that almost nobody talks about but actually made this country what it was. And we’re still living on its laurels today. Here’s an example of the kind of contact that makes all of this viable and real so that you can see how it happened.

Among Franklin’s numerous French correspondents was a man named DuPont de Nemours. Franklin met him in a visit to Paris in 1767. He was– DuPont de Nemours was one of the great writers at that time, philosophes, on economics, French economics. Mirabeau was of the school Quesnay, and so forth. Dupont then became interested in how wise men actually bring about occurrences, and he apprenticed himself then to Turgot who was one of the great French philosophers of that time – he wrote a life of Turgot. But he also apprenticed himself in a very large way to Franklin, because Franklin was the model for all these individuals. We’ll see that the French Revolution is also based on Franklin.

Dupont de Nemours, assisted, finally, the French minister Vergennes who negotiated the truce in 1782 that permitted the French to finally join, really effectively, with the United States, recognizing the United States as an independent country. He was also incidentally involved in the negotiations in 1777, through that winter in 1778, when Franklin negotiated the First Great Treaty with France to ensure that France would come into the Revolutionary War. And all of this was master card shuffling on Franklin’s part because the only thing this country had going at that time was the surrender of Burgoyne’s troops at Saratoga. Everywhere else in the field they were losing. But Franklin, masterfully parlayed that single triumph into a treaty. And when the French were coming into the war it made it a world war. And it took the pressure off the United States enough so that eventually there was a victory in the Revolutionary War. Well Dupont de Nemours was involved in these treaties. He was also involved during the French Revolution to the point that he had to leave France and come to the United States for asylum. I think those of you who’ve been with me for some time remember that the French Revolution was in good hands until Lafayette was exiled and the mob took over.

…Great purchase of Louisiana, Dupont de Nemours was Jefferson’s French envoy to Napoleon during that whole crisis. So the man who had helped Franklin from the 1760s was there helping Jefferson back in the 19th century. Finally, he would move to the United States in 1815, and he died here in this country. This is just one example. If you can just imagine in your mind now that Franklin had dozens and dozens and dozens of people like this constantly corresponding with them, orchestrating them you begin to get some sense of the magnificence of the man. No he’s not on Mount Rushmore, but he certainly doesn’t belong in TIME magazine either.

Well let’s take a little break here.

I guess my problem is always what to leave out. I have about two hundred notes to go through and each one of them was important enough to me at the time to put a bookmark in and make a notation mentally. So I’m always trapped in this. But I’ll come back to Franklin in a couple of years and do it complete. We’ll have gotten to a point to where we’ll have to do it then. The– the expectation that we’re going to be better, that life is going to be better, because we know how to interpret twenty more decks of tarot cards. All of this is the same kind of prejudicial illusory ignorance that leads the kids to play those machines in the pizza parlor. There’s nothing esoteric about that. What’s esoteric is learning about human nature, learning about this cosmos that actually occurs, and learning how to engender the actual dreams of accomplishment that can happen, create the world that can be made. And in that kind of a situation Franklin is a real hermetic magus. Where it counts. Making a new world happen. And he did.

He was interested of course in just everything under the sun because the method of liberty was to be open to all. He was for instance interested in a scheme for a new alphabet. Reforming the spelling of English totally by reforming the alphabet, the English alphabet. He did a whole pamphlet on this, wrote letters in it, had correspondence in this language – very much like what Bernard Shaw did in our time. Because he felt that if we had a scientific, phonetic alphabet, we could spell better, we could increase our vocabulary much easier because we would have confidence that we could spell it and so forth. And all of this would lead to an amplification of intelligence, of capacity. You see Franklin was really a mercurial figure. He was the Postmaster General not because he wanted that position as a position of power but because it was the only effective liaison that could be made throughout all the colonies at that time. The postal routes were the blood vessels that handled the passion of the American Revolution. Without the postal routes there would have been no communication between the colonies.

The English power structures felt that since we control the seas, that means the coast, that means the coastal towns. Nothing can happen without our permission. Franklin had engineered the great postal routes from Maine to Georgia inland out of the reach of guns. And set up all the houses along the way where fresh horses could be had. Trained the riders – Paul Revere was one of those kind of riders. In 1775, when it came to shooting war, Revere was one of those who rode non-stop because he could change horses. Because when you have the will of a man to be free he doesn’t have to sleep every night. It’s the horses that give up. After about twenty miles he rode nonstop to New York and they sent someone else nonstop down to Philadelphia. And within three weeks people down in Charleston and Savannah knew what had happened and understood, because that structure had been put in there thirty years before by Benjamin Franklin. And he held that structure until they took it away from him in London in the late 1774 when they realized what a power source this was because you could communicate, you could handle a liaison for all the colonies within a matter of a couple of weeks and you didn’t have to depend on the seacoast.

You know the British sized up the situation in the colonies very accurately in terms of traditional military understanding. They captured Boston, they captured New York, they captured Philadelphia, they captured Newport. They held New York during the entire Revolutionary War. We should have given up according to standard beaten – it says so in the manuals. The trouble was is that the American forces didn’t read the manuals. You know the first group to go out on their own, Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys, captured an old rundown thing called Fort Ticonderoga and people at the time said, “They’re really stupid. These backwoodsmen, these mountain men, they took an old dilapidated fort that would take you two years to refit it and put it together.” But you know if you look at the American Revolutionary War, Fort Ticonderoga is a focal point again and again and again. Why is that? Because it’s the navel of control of the whole communication, down Lake Champlain to that little portage, to the Hudson River and down to New York City, from the Saint Lawrence Seaway in Montreal to New York City. Fort Ticonderoga is one of the few points of strategic importance along that line. Ethan Allen was so backward, why he didn’t understand. He just happened to be born in those hills and knew that if you held that spot they couldn’t come down the Saint Lawrence, and they couldn’t come up the Hudson, they couldn’t cut you off. They couldn’t make an island out of New England. That– meant that the scene of the war had to be continental. You couldn’t cut them in half. And it wasn’t until several years later that gentleman Johnny Burgoyne tried to force his way down and took Ticonderoga, and took several other locations there, and people should have quit them because he had the strategic points. But they kept taking pot shots and they kept whittling away at him. And pretty soon they had him cut off from his supply lines and pretty soon they had him isolated in Saratoga and he had to give up. He had five thousand troops and he had no way to feed them. He had no munitions. And it was a big shock because the Americans did not play by the rules. They did not read the manuals. They played something called life because they were acclimated to a sense of reality, to cooperating with each other, not in terms of a model, but in the amphitheater of eternal wisdom which we call our actual lives, the actual events that we wish to deal with. They were not addicted to a model.

Unfortunately many people in our time are addicted all over again to thinking that if the mind controls models then nature is going to dance our tune. This is the mentality that leads to bulldozing trees and to enslaving people, including ourselves.

This development, and I’m having to skip almost everything here. This development of an open liaison through the Postal Service eventually came down to setting up Committees of Correspondence – notice the title – Committees of Correspondence. We’re going to correspond with each other so that every colony will have its own committees of correspondence. You choose your people in whatever way you want to choose them, and let us know what’s going on and we’ll do the same for you. And in order to have these Committees of Correspondence more accurate in a time of crisis we’ll have to have some place central where they can come together and meet together. And this is the very seed of the First Continental Congress. And the very first President of that First Continental Congress was Peyton Randolph from Virginia. And we see in Franklin’s correspondence he writes to a friend how glad he is. This is Thomas Cushing who was the head of the Committee of Correspondence in Massachusetts. There was Cushing, there was Samuel Adams – have you ever heard of him? – there was John Hancock – probably heard of him. These were the men who were on this Committee of Correspondence. And so Franklin writing to Cushing– Cushing 7th of July 1773 says,

“I am glad to see the Resolves of the Virginia House of Burgesses. There are brave Spirits among that People. I hope their Proposals will be readily complied with by all the Colonies.”

Do you get the gist of it? Some people in Virginia, in their Committee of Correspondence, got together and produced a remarkable document in 1773. The– one of the few sources for this, is in The Life of Patrick Henry by Wirt. You know, Patrick Henry was a Virginian. He was on that committee. Who else was on that committee? Peyton Randolph, Richard H. Lee, Benjamin Harrison, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson. They drew up some very emphatic statements. They stepped way out of line. The reason that they stepped way out of line is that the British governor for Virginia had dissolved them a few months before. So the people of Virginia got together and reelected every single person and put them all exactly back the way they had been and so the Virginia House of Burgesses then passed some resolutions and it was resolved in the most emphatic terms the exclusive right of the colony to tax themselves in all cases whatever. They complained of acts of British Parliament as violations of the British Constitution; their own Acts of Parliament were acts that were violating their own constitution. They’d become gangsters to themselves. What are they to us then?

Well, there were a lot of other things in here but this is the first time that Jefferson comes to Franklin’s attention. Jefferson at this time is just getting to be 30 years of age and Franklin is getting to be up into that canny age of sixty-eight when he said, you know I should feel old, but he says I feel pretty good. He says I have been staying here in England and been trying to leave year after year thinking I’m going to be too decrepit to make the voyage and here I am feeling better and better. He sensed that the limbo that had developed in the American-British situation was a very unhealthy morass. And so Franklin, looking for that focus which would throw the whole dynamic open, understanding that the stage was set, the stage of history was all set. And then he got the tremendous insight. A friend, an English friend, brought him a series of letters, correspondence – it was called the Hutchinson Correspondence. Hutchinson was supposed to be the governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony and it was a correspondence with unknown persons, presumably his lieutenant governor. And the way they talked about the colonists was the way that people talk about their slaves. And in order to back themselves up they wanted to have military presence. And wasn’t that just what happened? The British had sent troops to be stationed. They garrisoned Boston – four thousand troops – which were stationed in Boston then permanently. And it was like being under martial law. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation under martial law – I have several times – and it’s very uncomfortable. Because the first thing in the morning is the sense of how am I going to get around today? What are they going to do today? And wherever you go you have to make sure that you can get back. And this kind of mentality wears on you after a while. They were there for years in Boston.

And so by December 21st, 1773, Franklin sent this correspondence and it disclosed in this bombshell, the kinds of plannings. And in this correspondence it was written:

“But how Sir, were they Surprised to find [that] they had been deceived to find that the Parliament, at the very time they expected relief, pursued New Measures for Effectively Securing and enhancing the oppressive Revenues, and with this View by an Act, passed the last Session, [the British Parliament] empowered the East India Company to Ship their Teas to America.”

So these letters, these Hutchinson letters, became a focal point. And the focal point within those letters, within that scandal, became the tea in Boston Harbor. Thomas Cushing– Cushing then closed this letter to Franklin in 1773. He says,

“Nigh twenty days were now passed since the Arrival of one of the Tea Vessels Commanded by Captain Hall, at which time, according to [the] Act of Parliament, it was in the Power of the Custom House Officers to take the Teas into their own possession in order to Secure the duties, there were just grounds to think that they intended to do it the Minute the Twenty Days were expired that they would attempt to Land them by force and overbear any opposition that might be made, by a second Effusion of Blood: under these Apprehensions, the Teas the Evening of the 16th: Instant were destroyed by a Number of Persons unknown and in disguise” as Indians.

It was a severe affront. It was a psychic affront to the British power structures which they communicated almost in an epidemic fashion. This is the way fanatical wildfires start. So that the British men in the street felt that the colonists were harming their own sense of sovereignty over them. And Franklin again and again, in his correspondence and in speeches, is saying the average British person does not have sovereignty over the colonialists. Only the king has sovereignty. Not only are the House of Lords making the mistake that they have sovereignty over the colonists, now the man in the street in England thinks he has sovereignty. Any beggar in London thinks that he really is part and parcel of the kingship over the American people. And this has gone to the breaking point. This has become absurd.

It was at this time that Franklin’s son, William Franklin, began to differ with his father. He felt that his father had made a mistake in disclosing the Hutchinson correspondence. Franklin writing to him, the 5th of January 1774:

“Dear Son,
…No insinuations of the kind you mention, concerning Mr. Galloway have reached me, and if they had, it would have been without the least effect; as I have always had the strongest reliance on the steadiness of his friendship, and on the best grounds, the knowledge I have of his integrity, and the often repeated disinterested services he has rendered me. My return…” – to the United States, to the colonies – “...My return will interfere with nobody’s interest or influence in public affairs as my intention is to decline all interest in them and every active part, except where it can serve a friend, [or] to content myself with communicating the knowledge of them [which] my situation may have furnished me with, and be content with getting my advice for the public benefit, where it may be asked… [I am in] ...my sixty ninth year, and having lived so great a part of my life to the public, it seems but fair that I should be allowed to live the small remainder to myself and to my friends.… I am now seriously preparing for my departure…”

His wonderful relationship with his son was drawing to a close. The son was taking umbrage against the father for this increasingly. Franklin was also offered positions. He was offered money quietly and quietly. He was invited to teas at Lord Howe’s sister’s place, ostensibly to play chess with her. And then he noticed that every time he went to play chess that Lord Howe would come in and begin talking about the colonies and the situation. And other individuals would be invited, and pretty soon Franklin’s disgust began to rise. He realized that they were trying to set him up. And when he discovered that the same overtures had worked with his son he was heartbroken, and almost never again did he correspond with his son after 1775.

This is the description of an event which broke the diplomatic contact between the colonies and the British. The person who had single-handedly handled this, since 1757. And we’re now speaking of the beginning of 1775. When you tote that up in your mind, you see that for twenty-eight years Benjamin Franklin had been the exclusive representative of the New World and the old. So in order to take out their invective against the developing situation they brought Franklin in and they publicly invited all of the Lords and all of the couriers and palace guards and so forth. And they brought in professional prosecutors and they castigated in public Franklin for hours on end. What was his response? Here is a description by a Doctor Bancroft who was in the audience that day January 20th, 1775.

“Dr. Franklin did not ‘stand in a corner of the room,’ he stood close to the fireplace, on that side which was at the right hand of those who were looking toward the fire; in front of which, though at some distance, the members of the Privy Council were seated at a table. I obtained a place on the opposite side of the fireplace, a little farther from the fire; but Dr. Franklin’s face was directed towards me, and I had a full, uninterrupted view of it, and his person, during the whole time [of] which Mr. Wedderburn spoke. The Doctor was dressed in a full dress suit of spotted Manchester velvet, and stood conspicuously erect, without the smallest movement of any part of his body. The muscles of his face had been previously composed, so as to afford a placid, tranquil expression of countenance, and he did not suffer the slightest alteration of it… [though] he was so harshly improperly treated. In short, to quote the words which he employed concerning himself on another occasion, he kept his ‘countenance as immovable as if his features had been made of wood.’”

And the good Dr. Franklin stood there representing the new world. As hour after hour the great aristocratic power voices, enraged in London, hurled invective upon him and he took it. And he stayed for two months in London waiting to see if there was going to be any change of heart and realizing that there was not, he drew up an entire history, a public history, of the events that had led to this breach and left them to be published in London and took them with him to be published in the New World. And he left on March the 20th, 1775.

Of course, it took six weeks to get to Philadelphia, and when he was two weeks out at sea is when General Gage decided to move his crack troops out of Boston, ferried them across the Charles River, to move from Charlestown by stealth at night by force, march up towards Concord to seize the powder and the arms stored there, in the provincial munitions cache. And when a few colonists got in their way in Lexington Green in the morning they opened fire and killed eight of them and marched through in a disciplined fast column. And by the time they got to Concord, just a couple of hours on from Lexington, the various Sons of Liberty militia groups had collected together and began to take umbrage at the British, and the Revolutionary War began.

Emerson used to pride himself that, the first shot, the shot heard around the world, was fired at the bridge there in Concord. And that’s where Emerson’s house was, exactly on the spot, because he wanted to be in the seat of history. Thoreau had many things to say about Emerson and one of the things he liked was Emerson’s sense of justice. That if there is going to be a wisdom in this country we should know where we stand and why. We have to stand and why it is in such a spot that we have to stand. And if we forget that, then we no longer represent ourselves.

Franklin came– this won’t be on your tape so we’ll just have to give it to you– Franklin came to Philadelphia and within a month he was elected unanimously to the Second Continental Congress. And it was the Second Continental Congress that began the relationship between Franklin and Jefferson. And next week we’re going to get to that and we’ll develop there the tremendous élan that these two men share. And I think nothing can sum it up better than Franklin’s summation of what the British had gained at Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill. They had killed a few colonists at the exorbitant rate of £20,000 per person. They’d gained a mile of ground; in that same timeframe, sixty thousand new Americans had been born. That in face of this reality, in face of the understanding of human nature, in face of the whole cycles of history, which had veracity. And Franklin again and again would allude to the fact that we are now at the kinds of times that the Greeks and Romans were at. And that all history serves up to the intelligence of reason of man, an understandable scenario of events. And this is why from Thucydides on, Western history has sought to tell us and teach us these lessons of history.

And Franklin was saying in his correspondence that, this was now the time, probably more than ever, that various realities were coming to pass. And among them, in his letter of the 7th of July 1775, again to the great Joseph Priestley:

“Dear Friend
The Congress met at a time when all minds were so exasperated by the perfidy of General Gage, and his attack on the country people, that propositions [for] attempting an accommodation were not much relished; and it has been with difficulty that we have carried another humble petition to the crown, to give Britain one more chance, one opportunity more of recovering the friendship of the colonies; which however I think she has not sense enough to embrace, and so I conclude that she has lost them for ever. She has begun to burn our seaport towns; secure, I suppose, that we shall never be able to return the outrage in kind. She may doubtless destroy them all; but if she wishes to recover our commerce, are these the probable means? She must certainly be distracted; for no tradesmen out of Bedlam ever thought of increasing the number of his customers by knocking them on the head; or of enabling them to pay their debts by burning their houses.”

And so he writes to Joseph Priestley that he feels that the fabric of history has come full round, and that the quality of empire has been torn once and for all for ever. The only hope now is for the colonies to unite and become a free people. And that the problem of uniting the colonies is not foremost in his mind but the tutoring of them, to bid consciously for freedom rather than just to displace the British. That– that was the problem and it was to that end that Franklin, aged almost seventy, took up the position of schoolmaster among men once again and began working on yet another generation of figures. This time someone at the head of the class named Jefferson would learn and for the first time in his life Franklin would have the exciting experience of having a student who could surpass the master. And we’ll see that next week. This wonderful relationship between the old sage, the old Merlin, and the coming king of a new kind of world.

Well we’ll hope that some of you make it.