A fresh view of Ben Franklin

Benjamin Franklin's son William was having a devil of a difficult time with Pennsylvania farmers near Lancaster in the 1750s.

They were drunk, they were angry - and they had good reason for being both, as several dozen letters recently discovered in the British Library show.

The American Revolution was still two decades away. The French and Indian War was on, and Pennsylvanians, loyal subjects of King George II, were being asked to supply a British army under Gen. Edward Braddock that would march against the French in Western Pennsylvania.

And playing a part in the supply effort was Benjamin Franklin, whose role in what was known as the Wagon Affair is detailed in the letters, which had been tucked away in the British Library.

Alan Houston, a political science professor at the University of California-San Diego, stumbled across the letters while researching a book on Franklin. Some are from Franklin, some are to him, and some are by his contemporaries on the war.

Houston writes about the documents in the April issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. (An abstract of the article and sample documents are online at http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/index.cfm.)

"It's really remarkable to have a new batch of sources," said Scott Casper, visiting editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, which is published in Virginia. "It's quite stunning, particularly for a figure we know as well as Benjamin Franklin."

Houston came across a bound volume containing the documents as he hunted for source material that would better explain political and economic conditions in the Colonies during the French and Indian War.

He had requested what was catalogued as "Copies of Letters relating to the March of Gen. Braddock," he said.

The volume contained what Houston believes are faithfully handwritten copies of documents Franklin had lent to Thomas Birch, an acquaintance who was secretary of the Royal Society, England's venerable academy of science.

As Houston, sitting in the somber British library, realized the import of the reproductions, "I thought I was going to bounce like a 6-year-old at Christmas," he said.

Ellen Cohn, editor-in-chief of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, sponsored by the American Philosophical Society and Yale University, said it was a mystery why Birch copied the letters, "but we're extremely grateful he did."

The letters tell of life among ordinary Pennsylvanians in 1755, war flaring around them as the French and their American Indian allies fought the British.

The French had taken Fort Duquesne in what is Pittsburgh today, but then was the western frontier of Britain's American colonial territory. The British sent Braddock (with young George Washington as an aide-de-camp) to regain the fort. He was killed in the fighting, and the British lost that battle miserably, though they eventually won the war.

When Braddock and his troops originally arrived in Virginia, they had no transport to the battlefield. Franklin, visiting Virginia at the time in his role as postmaster general, said he could get Pennsylvania farmers to provide horses and carts, Houston said.

Before Houston uncovered the letters, it was thought that farmers gladly lent their carts and horses - that's the way Franklin had spun the story.

In May 1755, Franklin wrote to Braddock: "I must do this people justice to say that they have come into the furnishing of these Necessaries with great readiness and alacrity, many of them from a sense of Duty, and a desire of rendering some service to so good a King, than for the sake of the offered Wages."

That may not have been the whole truth. In a letter to his father, Franklin's son William painted a different picture - one of farmers unhappy over compensation they considered too low: "We had 40 Waggons appraised here on yesterday; but none of the Contracts were filled up till I came. . . . Never was such a Scene of Confusion, as we had the whole time. There is not one who is satisfied with the appraisement of his Waggons and Horses. Nothing but cursing and swearing at the appraisers, nay even threatening their lives."

The letters also show something of Franklin's personal life, including an unexpectedly softer side when it came to his wife, Deborah.

After giving her an account of his days, he closed an April 1755 letter from Lancaster by writing, "Write to me by every opportunity. I long to be with you, being, as ever, Your loving Husband, B.F."