Colonial Patronage: Two Letters from William Franklin to the Earl of Bute, 1762

R. C. Simmons

HOW did Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate son, William, become governor of New Jersey in 1762? The circumstances surrounding his appointment were the subject of contemporary comment, remain obscure, and are of continued interest to historians. Two letters do exist from William Franklin to Lord Bute, however, each seeking an American appointment and neither previously entered into the historical record, even by the indefatigable editors of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin. William Franklin's letters and the surrounding circumstances contribute something to the Franklin story as well as illuminate the workings of mid-eighteenth-century patronage and influence. Benjamin's advice to the young that they should achieve success by hard work and self-improvement was certainly relevant to those who like himself came from the ranks of the honest poor and aspired at first to become independent artisans. This is the Benjamin Franklin who entered American memory and imagination. But by the 1760s Franklin moved among the middling and upper ranks and in official circles. Among these groups, family and social connections, closeness to government, and the places that these connections and this closeness could provide were prime considerations, something hardly hinted at by Franklin in his Autobiography and public writings.	1
Benjamin acted to keep William close to him, in his web of contacts, even dependent on him. Certainly William's illegitimacy added to the risks he faced in moving outside his father's sphere and venturing, for example, into a career in colonial politics that depended on fighting elections or into a business career. As Sheila L. Skemp has written, his and his father's enemies "seldom missed an opportunity to use his illegitimacy to attack the credibility and character of both father and son."1 In London his father's position gave William direct experience of the workings of power and patronage and a close acquaintance with his father's increasing access to and manipulation of these. William's letters show how completely he had mastered the language of deferential but effective self-presentation characteristic of the place seeker in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world.	2
When the Franklins arrived in London in 1757, the son was about twenty-nine years old and still dependent on his father's support and patronage. It perhaps fitted Benjamin Franklin's views on the usefulness of a practical education that, although William received a gentlemanly upbringing, he had left Alexander Annand's classical academy at the age of thirteen and for some time "worked in his father's print shop, running errands" and trying to avoid his stepmother's "carping tongue."2 He had served briefly as an officer in a militia company in the 1740s, contemplated a military career, and joined an expedition to the Ohio country. It was finally settled that he should study law. His name was entered by his father's friend William Strahan at the Middle Temple in London on February 11, 1751.3 His first official civil posts were found for him by his father--as clerk of the Pennsylvania Assembly and later as postmaster of Philadelphia. In 1755, he was also grand secretary of the Philadelphia Freemasons; his father was deputy grand master.4 After the outbreak of the French and Indian War, he accompanied his father on several important missions, assisting him with courage and efficiency.	. . .