ABSTRACT
Starting in 1764, Benjamin Franklin served as Pennsylvania’s agent in London. He stood vigorously for the American colonies’ rights; in 1765, for example, he lobbied energetically for repeal of the Stamp Act, the fiscal measure that sparked such concerted opposition to British rule in America. For a future revolutionary, he nevertheless took a remarkably disapproving line on popular contention. Writing in April 1768 of what we now regard as a great popular political mobilization, he declared to his son:
Since my last … nothing has been talked or thought of here but elections. There have been amazing contests all over the kingdom, £20 or 30,000 of a side spent in several places, and inconceivable mischief done by debauching the people and making them idle, besides the immediate actual mischief done by drunken mad mobs to houses, windows, &c. The scenes have been horrible. London was illuminated two nights running at the command of the mob for the success of Wilkes in the Middlesex election; the second night exceeded anything of the kind ever seen here on the greatest occasions of rejoicing, as even the small cross streets, lanes, courts, and other out-of-the-way places were all in a blaze with lights, and the principal streets all night long, as the mobs went round again after two o’clock, and obliged people who had extinguished their candles to light them again. Those who refused had all their windows destroyed … Tis really an extraordinary event, to see an outlaw and exile, of bad personal character, not worth a farthing, come over from France, set himself up as a candidate for the capital of the kingdom, miss his election only by being too late in his application, and immediately carrying it for the principal county. The mob (spirited up by numbers of different ballads sung or roared in every street) requiring gentlemen and ladies of all ranks as they passed in their carriages to shout for Wilkes and liberty, marking the same words on all their coaches and chalk, and No. 45 on every door, which extends a vast way along the roads into the country. (Franklin 1972: 98–99)
