"Yours, B. Franklin."
But strained as his relations with Strahan were for a while, it is agreeable to know that the estrangement between such old and close friends was not everlasting.
To write at length concerning Franklin's services during his brief stay at home would involve giving a history of the whole affairs of the colonies at this time. But space presses, and this ground is familiar and has been traversed in other volumes in this series. It seems sufficient, therefore, rather to enumerate than to narrate his various engagements, and thus to reserve more room for less well-known matters.
On the very day after his return, when he had scarce caught the breath of land, he was unanimously elected by the Assembly a delegate to the Provincial Congress. It was an emergency when the utmost must be made of time, brains, and men. By subsequent reëlections he continued to sit in that body until his departure for France. There was business enough before it: the organization of a government, of the army, of the finances; most difficult of all, the arrangement of a national policy, and the harmonizing of conflicting opinions among men of influence at home. In all that came before the Congress Franklin was obliged to take his full share. He seems to have been upon all the busy and important committees. There were more ardent spirits, greater propelling forces, than he was; but his wisdom was transcendent. Dickinson and his followers were bent upon sending one more petition to the king, a scheme which was ridiculed almost with anger by the more advanced and resolute party. But Franklin's counsel was to give way to their wishes, as being the best policy for bringing them later into full accord with the party which was for war. He had no hopes of any other good result from the proceeding; but it also chimed with his desire to put the English as much as possible in the wrong. In the like direction was a clause in his draft of a declaration, intended to be issued by Washington in the summer of 1775. To counteract the charge that the colonies refused to contribute to the cost of their own protection, he proposed that, if Great Britain would abolish her monopoly of the colonial trade, allowing free commerce between the colonies and all the rest of the world, they would pay into the English sinking fund £100,000 annually for one hundred years; which would be more than sufficient, if "faithfully and inviolably applied for that purpose, ... to extinguish all her present national debt."
At the close of this document he administered a telling fillip in his humorous style to that numerous class who seek to control practical affairs by sentiment, and who now would have had their prattle about the "mother country" outweigh the whole accumulation of her very unmaternal oppression and injustice. Concerning the allegation of an unfilial ingratitude, he said: "There is much more reason for retorting that charge on Britain, who not only never contributes any aid, nor affords, by an exclusive commerce, any advantages to Saxony, her mother country; but, no longer since than the last war, without the least provocation, subsidized the king of Prussia while he ravaged that mother country, and carried fire and sword into its capital.... An example we hope no provocation will induce us to imitate." Had this declaration ever been used, which it was not, the dignity of the grave general who commanded the American forces would have compelled him to cut off this closing snapper from the lash, amusing as it was. The witty notion had found a more appropriate place in the newspaper article which had dumfounded the guests at the English country house. Commenting upon this, Mr. Parton well says: "Here perhaps we have one of the reasons why Dr. Franklin, who was universally confessed to be the ablest pen in America, was not always asked to write the great documents of the Revolution. He would have put a joke into the Declaration of Independence, if it had fallen to him to write it.... His jokes, the circulating medium of Congress, were as helpful to the cause as Jay's conscience or Adams's fire; ... but they were out of place in formal, exact, and authoritative papers."[37]
A document which cost Dr. Franklin much more labor than this declaration was a plan for a union of the colonies, which he brought forward July 21, 1775. It was the "first sketch of a plan of confederation which is known to have been presented to Congress." No final action was ever taken upon it. It contained a provision that Ireland, the West India Islands, the Canadian possessions, and Florida might, upon application, be received into the confederation.
Franklin's duties in Congress were ample to consume his time and strength; but they were far from being all that he had to do. Almost immediately after his return he was made chairman of a committee for organizing the postal service of the country. In execution of this duty he established in substance that system which has ever since prevailed; and he was then at once appointed postmaster-general, with a salary of £1000 per annum. When franking letters he amused himself by changing the formula, "Free: B. Franklin" into "B. Free, Franklin."
He was next made chairman of the provincial committee of safety, a body which began its sittings at the comfortable, old-fashioned hour of six o'clock in the morning. Its duty was to call out and organize all the military resources of Pennsylvania, and generally to provide for the defenses of the province. It worked with much efficiency in its novel and difficult department. Among other things, Franklin devised and constructed some ingenious "marine chevaux de frise" for closing the river approaches to Philadelphia.
In October, 1775, he was elected a member of the Assembly of the Province. But this did not add to his labors; for the oath of allegiance had not yet been dispensed with; he would not take it, and resigned his seat.
In September, 1775, Franklin, Lynch of South Carolina, and Harrison of Virginia, as a committee of Congress, were dispatched to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to confer with Washington concerning military affairs. They rode from Philadelphia to the leaguer around Boston in thirteen days. Their business was achieved with no great difficulty; but they lingered a few days more in that interesting camp, and were absent six weeks. General Greene has recorded how he gazed upon Franklin, "that very great man, with silent admiration;" and Abigail Adams tells with what interest she met him whom "from infancy she had been taught to venerate," and how she read in his grave countenance "patriotism in its full lustre" and with it "blended every virtue of a Christian." The phrase was not well chosen to fall from the pen of Mrs. Adams, yet was literally true; Franklin had the virtues, though dissevered from the tenets which that worthy Puritan dame conceived essential to the make-up of a genuine Christian. The time came when her husband would not have let her speak thus in praise of Benjamin Franklin.