If you remember back to a few months ago, some Americans had gotten rather upset by the comments made by Barack Obama’s minister regarding what God should do to this country and his subsequent irreverence about the statement. But ostentatious and megalomaniacal black preachers aside, did you know that there was a time when white people also were cursing this country? In fact, we were not even a nation yet and people despised what we stood for—way back in the turbulent years of the 1760s and ‘70s. The original “G—d—America” speech occurred before the era of YouTube, and it was a politician rather than a holy man who issued it; however, the person who caught up in the controversy was none other than the witty and esteemed Benjamin Franklin. Here is the scoop.
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In January of 1774, Franklin was called before the Privy Council of London. He had been Pennsylvania’s minister to Britain since 1757, and had spent all but two years of that tenure in Europe. Franklin, while now remembered as one of the greatest Americans, at the time loved and was loved by Europe. His work with science—specifically the lightning rod, musings about the Gulf Stream, the glass armonica, fireplace designs, etc.—and his work as a printer and author had earned him acclaim with the Royal Academy of Science in France and the Royal Society in London as a scholar and a philosopher. It was during his European tour that he received several honorary doctorate degrees in law, thus earning him the title “Doctor.” Quite simply, London was the philosophical and scientific metropolis of the eighteenth century—the city was dirty, the water toxic, the people drunken, the politics opaque, and the prostitutes plentiful, but Dr. Franklin loved being in the midst of intellectuals and personages of consequence.
Furthermore, Franklin was an all-around amiable gentleman. He was charming, always had a relevant anecdote at hand, and most importantly, was virtuous enough to beg for the reconciliation of Anglo-American differences in a peaceable way. After the French and Indian Wars ended, Britain was in debt from decades of conflict with France, and the British subjects on the eastern side of the Atlantic were all taxed heavily. The colonies, which benefited from the war now that Britain controlled the eastern half of the continent, were chosen for a new tax program in 1766, which included light duties on molasses and paper products (the Sugar and Stamp Acts). In response, the colonists, led by the rambunctious Massachusettsians, boycotted the Stamp Act and destroyed the homes of tax collectors. Franklin, who was alarmed at the news once it reached Britain, appeared before the House of Commons at the summons of Lord Rockingham, the prime minister who inherited the fallout from his predecessor’s (Grenville) program. Franklin’s testimony may have played a role in the repeal of the tax, as he asserted that the colonists already paid taxes of their own, provided the main mode of defense in the war, and had no representation in Parliament, thus ought not be subjected to internal taxes. The duties were lifted but a Declaratory Act was thrown out to the colonies as a warning that Parliament did indeed have the right to legislate for America.
Determined to harness American revenues, acting Prime Minister Charles Townshend proposed a series of duties on lead, paint, tea, etc. in 1767 that were met by similar outrage in the colonies—for the additional reason that the taxes would pay for the salaries of royal governors and judges, freeing them from being salaried by the colonial legislatures and thus having any stake at all in the welfare of the colonies. The Townshend duties were made none the less painful by the quasi-simultaneous passage of the Quartering Act; after New York refused to obey, Parliament suspended their legislature. Riots and non-importation followed leading the new prime minister, Lord North, to again distance himself from the failed policies of his predecessor by repealing the taxes three years later. However, the tax on tea remained and was further augmented by the Tea Act of 1773 that granted the financially-destitute East India Company exclusive trading status with the colonies. In December of that year, Bostonians dressed as Indians boarded a tea ship in the harbor and dumped 90,000 pounds of tea (worth ₤10,000) overboard. Meanwhile, Ben Franklin, who had been appointed the representative of Massachusetts colony in addition to being Pennsylvania’s, had publicly gone on record as supporting reconciliation with the colonies but also with propers being paid by Parliament to the Americans’ right of representation. In hopes of improving the colonial reputation, in 1773 he anonymously published letters (leaked by a still anonymous source) written by Massachusetts Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson that showed Hutchinson advocating stricter measures to bring the rebellious colonial faction to its knees. Franklin thought that this would shed light on misinformation that Britons were receiving about the depth of American dissatisfaction. Once the letters reached the Boston Papers, the Massachusetts legislature sent Franklin a petition to present to Parliament asking for the recall of their governor and his lieutenant.
Parliament naturally was annoyed at this petition and a previous one from Massachusetts, but they were more outraged at the publication of these letters (akin to the Pentagon Papers leak of two centuries later). Two Britons had dueled almost to the death after one accused the other of being the author when Franklin spoke up about his role in their publication, though he refused to reveal his source. Consequently, he was called before the Council in 1774 to discuss (what he thought to be simply) how the letters were obtained and why they were published (in his opinion, they were between public officials talking about public matters). Franklin was ordered to procure council and the hearing would reconvene in two weeks. Unfortunately for him, in those two weeks news of the Tea Party reached London, and the inquest he was about to receive would take a very different tone.
On January 29, Franklin entered the building known as the Cockpit—during the reign of Henry VIII it was the site of actual cockfighting, hence the name. It was now an ordinary government building, but the skirmish today would be appropriately brutal. Inside, members of the House of Commons, as well as the press and the public, crowded to watch—the Lords were the official audience, and they were hardly pro-America or pro-Franklin. Franklin’s council, John Dunning, an agent of the Massachusetts legislature, started by arguing that the petition being reviewed and the letters being examined were of political, not legal consequence, and belonged in the houses of Parliament, not in a court of law. Unfortunately, Dunning suffered from a lung ailment and spoke so softly as to barely be audible. He only got so far into his argument before the solicitor general of the North ministry, Alexander Wedderburn, jumped up to really start the show.
What happened next was perhaps the most disastrous diplomatic mistake that the British government could have made. Wedderburn held the position that he did because Lord North thought, to paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, that it was better to have him inside the government pissing out rather than outside pissing in. For more than an hour, Wedderburn damned the nearly-seventy-year-old Franklin and the American colonies so vigorously that even the scurrilous British press could not reprint parts of his diatribe. Charging the Doctor with having “forfeited all the respect of societies and of men” and hoping that the Lords would “mark and brand the man” (this may have been a figurative expression; however this was a time when punishments did actually include marking or branding the perpetrator, so Wedderburn may have meant the worst for Franklin). He rhetorically asked the Lords assembled whether the “revengeful temper…of the bloody African, is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy of the wily American,” referring to Franklin’s “utmost insensibility of remorse” for infiltrating the governor’s privacy. He concluded by asserting that the purpose of the angry Americans was “to establish their power, and make all future governors bow to their authority. They wish to erect themselves into a tyranny greater than the Roman; to be able, sitting in their own secret cabal, to dictate for the Assembly…and to get even a virtuous Governor dragged from his seat, and made the sport of a Boston mob.” What was in it for Franklin? Obviously a governorship, of which Wedderburn trusted that the Lords would not see fit to bestow upon such a vile man.
During the ordeal, the crowd, including some of the Lords, laughed and cheered while Franklin stood silent and still, choosing not to dignify the assault with a response. He was highly pissed. Not only was Franklin hopeful of moving to the mother country in his retirement, but he had many British friends and consistently weighed the advantages of a vibrant country against the disadvantage of a corrupt politics. Now, he could see how the game was to be played. Immediately after the hearing, the Lords called the Massachusetts petition seditious and rabble rousing, and soon after dismissed Franklin from his appointed position as deputy postmaster of the colonies (a position he had held for twenty years). Franklin stayed in the country for a year longer, taken up by the moderate voices of Lords Chatham, Howe, and Camden; however, when he attended a speech given by Chatham, another Lord arose and sneered that the address reeked of American authorship, pointing to Franklin and calling him “one of the bitterest and most mischievous enemies this country had ever known.” That was it, Franklin was out of there. Before he left, he drafted a letter to the secretary of state for American affairs, demanding that rather than the colonists pay Britain for the tea lost in the Tea Party, Britain should repay Boston for revenues lost during the port closure. Lord Camden advised Franklin against sending the letter, so Franklin did not and simply left the county.
As a result, Britain lost a friend and gained an enemy. He was the most famous American in the world at that time and was caught in the unfortunate circumstance of being considered too American by the English and too English by some Americans. Now, upon his return to Philadelphia he was immediately elected to the Continental Congress, where he was appointed to the committee which drafted the Declaration of Independence (mainly revising Jefferson’s handiwork), the “secret committee” which was charged with obtaining matériel, and of course, he was the minister to France who negotiated the alliance which won the war.
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So, what is the point here? Considering the parallels: Reverend Wright was representative of a community (i.e. Britain) that felt as if it had been aggrieved; as a result, he responded using incendiary rhetoric that was divisive to the larger polity (i.e. the empire) but soothing to his followers. Barack Obama (i.e. Franklin) was loyal to Wright, his mentor and advisor, but once he saw how little good his comments were doing for the country, he had to pick a side based on what he believed. Obama did what he had to as a politician just like Franklin did as an American. The assertions that Britain and Wright made toward their larger communities may or may not have been completely true, but they were too emotionally charged for Franklin and Obama, men who promoted progressivism and unity. The moral being: choose the path that does the most good for the most people. Or, in the words of Franklin’s Poor Richard character, “A good example is the best sermon.”
Source: The First American by H.W. Brands
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