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Franklin & Washington
By Edward J. Larson
Morrow, 335 pages, $29.99BYSTEPHENBRUMWELLA
T A TIMEwhen Ameri-
can politics is increas-
ingly dominated by
rancor, turbulence and
division, it is perhaps
unsurprising that books about the
Republic’s revered Founding Fathers
are as popular as ever. To authors and
publishers, the select band of men who
championed independence from Brit-
ain and hammered out the Consti-
tution resemble a pack of cards to be
endlessly reshuffled and dealt out in
different hands. Alongside biographies
or group portraits of the Founders,
another approach is to examine a pair
whose alliance—or, more often,
rivalry—is credited with forging the
nation. Recently, for example, Alexan-
der Hamilton was separately linked
with George Washington, Thomas Jef-
ferson and his nemesis, Aaron Burr,
while several eminent historians have
been drawn to the power struggle
between Jefferson and John Adams.
In “Franklin & Washington: The
Founding Partnership,” Edward J.
Larson lays down a pairing that has
hitherto been neglected. Few would
quibble with Mr. Larson’s verdict that
George Washington and Benjamin
Franklin rank as the pre-eminent
Founders: Without the former’s deter-mined leadership of the Continental
Army during the Revolutionary War
and the latter’s assiduous cultivation
of the French support that ultimately
secured victory, there would be no
United States.
Mr. Larson acknowledges that these
foremost Founders make an unlikely
couple. The gregarious and folksy
Franklin (1706-90) was old enough to
be Washington’s father. Born in Boston
to humble parents but associated with
Philadelphia after he moved there in
his teens, Franklin was an enlightened
polymath, a printer, scientist and in-
ventor who became an opponent of
slavery. Washington (1732-99), the re-
strained, status-conscious, slave-own-
ing Virginian gentleman, can seem like
Franklin’s opposite. If the aloof Wash-
ington came to be regarded as his
country’s father, Mr. Larson observes,
Franklin was its approachable uncle.
Despite marked differences in back-
ground and temperament, Washington
and Franklin had traits in common.
Dedicated Freemasons with a fond-
ness for English porter beer, both men
were driven to improve their lot
through hard work. Crucially, they
shared a vision of an independent and
united America based upon a strong
central government, and each strove
tirelessly to achieve that end.
While Mr. Larson concedes that
Franklin and Washington were never
bound by formal, official ties, he
maintains that they nonetheless
worked together toward their com-
mon cause with extraordinary success.
It was, in his estimation, a historic
collaboration, “a three-decade-long
partnership” characterized by friend-
ship, not rivalry.
But it is necessary to be wary
about exaggerating the length—and
strength—of their relationship. Mr.
Larson traces this back to April 1755,at the onset of the French and Indian
War, when both men were involved in
the ill-fated British campaign against
Fort Duquesne (near modern Pitts-
burgh) under Maj. Gen. Edward Brad-
dock. Franklin organized the expe-
dition’s wagons while Washington
served as a volunteer aide-de-camp.
Mr. Larson speculates that they met
for the first time at Frederick, Md., but
there’s no way of knowing for sure.
As colonel of the Virginia Regiment,
Washington was still defending his
colony’s frontier in 1757 when Franklin
left for London to represent colonial
interests. Save for a two-year break,
Franklin remained there until 1775,
returning just in time to attend the
Second Continental Congress, opened
in May when the fight for American
independence had already begun.
Washington, soon to command the
Continental Army, was also present.
It was an opportunity, Mr. Larson be-
lieves, for the two men to “rekindle”
the “friendship” apparently estab-
lished 20 years earlier.
In December 1776, as the badly
beaten Washington retreated across
the Delaware River, Franklin arrived in
Paris as American envoy, charged withThe acute exasperation that both
men experienced at the feebleness of
Congress during the war convinced
them of the need for an effective
federal government, with the power
to levy taxation. This conviction, we
are told, “propelled them on converg-
ing paths toward the Constitutional
Convention of 1787.” As it loomed,
there is no doubt that Washington and
Franklin were on cordial terms, treat-
ing each other with the utmost re-
spect. Hosting the summit as Penn-
sylvania’s state president, Franklin
wrote to Washington urging that his
prestigious presence was vital to its
success. And so it proved.
Mr. Larson has written a dual
biography intended to highlight the
overlap between his subjects. As
their combined lives spanned almost
the entire 18th century, this is an
ambitious undertaking. Perhaps in-
evitably, given such a broad and
hectic canvas, there are some minor
glitches. The Redcoats who marched
to disaster with Braddock, for exam-
ple, were not the elite Coldstream
Guards but the less glamorous and
more expendable 44th and 48th
Regiments. Likewise, specialists may
be puzzled by the author’s habit of
equating the American Revolution
with the war of 1775-83, rather than
extending it to include the decades
of political upheaval that bracketed
the fighting.
Yet “Franklin & Washington” does
ample justice to its subjects’ achieve-
ments. Whatever the true nature of
their partnership, there can be no
doubt that both Founders provided
an example of selfless and honorable
service to their country.Mr. Brumwell’s “George Washington:
Gentleman Warrior” won the 2013
George Washington Book Prize.Friends
At the
Founding
enlisting French aid for the patriot
cause. Deploying all his wit, charm
and international fame at the court
of King Louis XVI, Franklin proved
himself a consummate diplomat. The
cash and munitions he secured keptthe Continental Army alive, and the
Franco-American alliance of 1778
changed the entire nature of the con-
flict, paving the way for the pivotal
British defeat at Yorktown in 1781.
Tormented by gout and kidney stones,
Franklin stayed on to negotiate the
peace treaty of 1783 before finally
returning home in 1785. Although
their efforts on behalf of American
liberty had been complementary and
equally vital, during all that time
Washington and Franklin had commu-
nicated only by letter.If the restrained
Washington was his
country’s father, the
gregarious Franklin was
its approachable uncle.BOOKS
‘Let every parent tell the shameful story to his listening children, till tears of pity glisten in their eyes, or boiling passion shakes their tender frames.’—JOHN HANCOCK
GRAPHICAARTIS/GETTY IMAGES
FATHER FIGURES‘Signing of the Constitution’ (1940) by Howard Chandler
Christy. Franklin sits at center and Washington stands on the platform.The Boston Massacre:
A Family History
By Serena Zabin
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 296 pages, $30
BYKATHLEENDUVALS
OLDIERS ARE PEOPLE TOO.
That’s an obvious truth for soldiers
and soldiers’ families, but too often
they are spoken of as tools to be
sent, for good or for evil, depending
on who is doing the sending. When we
remember past wars, soldiers get lost in the
search for straightforward lessons. Highly
charged debates over the Civil War leave little
room for the individual motives of those who
fought on either side, whereas for the American
Revolution, British soldiers have long been the
undifferentiated bad guys, tools of an empire
violently trying to constrain an independent
people. The “Boston Massacre” of 1770 seems
proof of that portrayal, even if not quite in the
melodramatic terms of Patriot Joseph Warren,
who at the second annual commemoration
in 1772 recalled “our children subjected to
the barbarous caprice of the raging soldiery;
our beauteous virgins exposed to all the
insolence of unbridled passion.”
The moral high ground makes for good
speeches, and Warren’s eloquence helped to
persuade Bostonians to resist their empire, but
historical accuracy and human understanding
require coming down from the high ground
and seeing people in all their complexity.
Serena Zabin’s rich and highly enjoyable book
does just that, revealing that, even at the
Boston Massacre, “those who wore uniforms
were not themselves uniform.” Most of the
book takes place between 1768 and 1770, as
Bostonians shared their streets, shops, houses,
churches, and public hospital with over 2,000
soldiers and nearly 1,000 of the soldiers’ wives
and children, all of them Britons in a British
colony in the British Empire.
Ms. Zabin, a professor of history and Ameri-
can studies at Carleton College, eloquently
introduces us to people like Jane Chambers,
an Irishwoman who married a soldier and who
herself served in the British army where he
was posted, first in Halifax and then in Boston.
Early modern armies employed women to
do the kind of work that men believed only
women could do, and cooking and laundry for
an army was no minor task. The presence ofPreston, the officer who would be accused of
ordering the soldiers to fire on the crowd on
that fateful March day.
Anyone who has read Jane Austen will
suspect that some young female Bostonians
held a sunnier view of soldiers than their
parents did. More than one young woman
reportedly went into “great raptures” when the
regiments arrived. John Rowe’s February 1770
party full of British officers was the idea of his
niece, Sukey Inman. The previous June, in a
scene too lowbrow for an Austen book, Joseph
Lasenby, a member of Samuel Adams’s Sons of
Liberty, discovered a soldier in bed with his
granddaughter.
Sukey Inman ultimately married a British
officer, and she was not the only one. Ms. Zabin
estimates that around 40 local women married
soldiers in Boston between 1768 and 1772. In
those same years, over 100 babies baptized in
Boston’s churches were the children of soldiers,
often with godparents who were both locals and
there with the army. Many Boston families had
to ask themselves, as Ms. Zabin astutely puts it,
“Should they be thought of as invading soldiers
or as sons-in-law?” Not every Boston woman
who fell in love with a soldier wanted to become
a regimental wife, however, a fact that encour-
aged a high desertion rate and a significant
number of young families who left Boston for
places that asked fewer questions.
Among the many accomplishments of Ms.
Zabin’s deep look at these interconnections is
revealing the presence of black men and women
in Boston’s daily life, a ubiquity that helps
contextualize how the dockworker Crispus
Attucks became one of the casualties of the
Boston Massacre. Boston life in 1770 was not as
segregated as it would later become. Bostonian
Daniel Halsey, a free black instrument maker,
rented a house to the white wife of a soldier
and her three children at the northern foot of
Beacon Hill. Nearby, two soldiers’ wives—
Catherine Charloe and Frances McCormack, one
black and one white—lodged together. Jamaican
John Bacchus, a drummer in the British army,
stayed in another Boston neighborhood.
Proximity bred conflict as well as sociability
and economic benefits. Sometimes a soldier
was knocked down in the street for, as far as
he could or would tell, just wearing a red coat.
More than one Bostonian refused to shake
hands with a soldier “for fear of Catching the
Itch,” a phrase that meant what you think it
means. None of this is trivial; questions ofwhether a family member or neighbor is a
friend or enemy get to the heart of revolutions
and civil wars. And they came together in the
bloody snow outside the Boston Custom House
on March 5, 1770.
As the commotion that would end in death
began, the recently married James Hartigan
was on duty in the guardhouse not far from the
house where he rented rooms with his Boston-
born wife in the home of a Boston man whose
children had grown and left home. Another
soldier on duty was Edward Montgomery,
whose Irish wife, Isabella, earlier that evening
had yelled from her doorstoop that Boston was
“too haughty and too proud” and “many of the
arses would be laid low before the morning.”
A neighbor responded, “I hope your husband
will be killed.” Isabella’s husband survived, but
a jury would find him guilty of manslaughter.
Intimacies begun before the shootings did
not immediately cease. Bostonian Edward
Crafts was nearly shot by a detachment of
nervous and angry soldiers but saved when he
called out the name of one of them, who was
his friend. As Montgomery and Hartigan were
held in jail to face trial, their wives remained
in their Boston homes despite the tension,
probably walking through the streets every day
to take food to their husbands in jail. Bostonian
women did not stop marrying British soldiers.
John Adams agreed to be an attorney defend-
ing the soldiers, and a jury composed of
Massachusetts men acquitted Capt. Preston.
Yet very different stories would come out
of that day about who was to blame and what
was to be done. One saw tyranny in the shoot-
ing of innocent civilians; another saw rebellion
and treason that had to be put down. Like a
“bad divorce,” Ms. Zabin tells us, what had
once seemed differences that could be
smoothed over by switching the subject to
fears of smallpox or the price of bread were
replaced by “a stark portrayal of conflict and
separation” and “inexorably growing hostility.”
The family history of the Boston Massacre
“reminds us of the human bonds as well as
the political ones that were broken at the
beginning of the American Revolution.”Ms. DuVal, a professor at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author
of “Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of
the American Revolution.”NEWSFrom a 1770 broadside.
BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
women made the British army into “a social
world of families, friends, and children.”
Jane and Matthew Chambers came with this
social world to Boston in 1768 to help enforce
the new taxes of the Townshend Acts in the
face of colonial resistance. The Crown had
offshore barracks, but they were too small for
all of the newcomers, inconvenient to central
Boston and not a fitting place for a family.
Housing families like the Chamberses would
change the course of history.
The town of Boston refused to provide
lodging, in violation of the Quartering Act.
(The Declaration of Independence a few years
later would include “Quartering large bodies of
armed troops among us” in its charges againstGeorge III.) So soldiers and their families put
down pallets on the second floor of Faneuil
Hall, where anyone attending a Boston town
meeting or court session had to step around
them. The entire 29th regiment pitched its
tents on the Boston Common. These scenes
clearly pitted imperial power against colonial
resistance, yet Ms. Zabin deepens our under-
standing by juxtaposing them with stories of
real women and men trying to adjust to this
awkward situation. In one of the tents, Jane
Chambers tended her sick baby, while Matthew
found a nearby Congregational church that
agreed to conduct an emergency baptism.
Bostonians may have hoped that the empire
would withdraw its troops if the townspeople
refused to quarter them, but the army began
paying rent, and soldiers and their families
moved out into houses, rooms and outbuildings
in every neighborhood in town, including South
Boston, where the Chamberses found a rental
house. For two years, Bostonians of all classes
socialized with people who had come with the
army. Just weeks before the Boston Massacre,
John Rowe, a Bostonian active in the move-
ment to boycott British goods, hosted a party
that included Commander of the 14th Regiment
Lt. Col. William Dalrymple and Capt. ThomasBostonians refused to be forced
to house British soldiers. So
the army paid rent to willing
landlords, and soldiers’ families
settled down all over town.