The all important council was to be held in Albany. Governor Hamilton appointed four commissioners, of whom Franklin was one, to act in behalf of Pennsylvania. They were furnished with rich gifts with which to purchase the favor of the Indians. It was a long and tedious journey from Philadelphia to Albany.
Franklin, on this journey, was deeply impressed with the importance of a union of the colonies for self-defence. He therefore drew up a plan for such union. Several gentlemen of the highest intelligence in New York, having examined it, gave it their cordial approval. He accordingly laid it before Congress.
There were several other persons in other colonies who were impressed as deeply as Franklin with a sense of the importance of such a confederacy, and they also sent in their suggestions.
Congress appointed a committee of one from each province, to consider the several plans. The committee approved of Franklin’s plan, and reported accordingly. While the commissioners were conferring with the Indians in Albany, Congress was engaged in discussing the plans of a confederacy. Franklin’s plan was finally rejected. It did not meet the views either of the Assembly, or of the British Court. And here we see, perhaps the germs of the great conflict which soon culminated in the cruel war of the Revolution.
The Assembly objected to the plan as too aristocratic, conferring too much power upon the crown. The court emphatically rejected it as too democratic, investing the people with too much power. Franklin ever affirmed that his plan was the true medium. Even the royalist governor of Pennsylvania warmly commended the compromise he urged.
In visiting Boston he was shown an electric tube, recently sent from England. With this tube some very surprising electrical experiments were performed, ushering in a new science, of which then but very little was known. Franklin became intensely interested in the subject. Upon his return to Philadelphia, he devoted himself, with great assiduity, to experimenting with electric tubes. At this time he wrote to a friend,
“I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time, as this has lately done; for what with making experiments when I can be alone, and repeating them to my friends and acquaintances, who, from the novelty of the thing, come continually in crowds to see them, I have little leisure for anything else.”
This was during the winter of 1746-7. Franklin suggested that the electricity was collected, not created by friction. He also propounded the theory of positive and negative electricity. He was, at this time, comparatively a wealthy man, and consequently could afford to devote his time to philosophical investigation. It is estimated that his income, from his estates, amounted to about seven hundred pounds a year; this was equal to about six or seven thousand dollars at the present time. Mr. Parton writes,
“Besides this independence, Franklin was the holder of two offices, worth together perhaps one hundred and fifty pounds a year. His business, then more flourishing than ever, produced an annual profit, as before computed, of two thousand pounds; bringing up his income to the troublesome and absurd amount of nearly three thousand pounds; three times the revenue of a colonial governor.”