When the passage of the Stamp Act in 1765 startled the American colonies out of their provincial sense of security and made them aware of their real attitude toward the mother country, Franklin was in London. Eleven years earlier, in 1754, he had offered a plan for the Union of the Colonies, but this had not contemplated separation from England. It was rather what we should call a scheme for imperial federation under the British Crown. We may use his word union, however, in a different field from that of politics. How much union of sentiment, of mental and moral life, of literary, educational, and scientific endeavor, was there in the colonies when the hour of self-examination came? Only the briefest summary may be attempted here.
As to race, these men of the third and fourth generation since the planting of the colonies were by no means so purely English as the first settlers. The 1,600,000 colonists in 1760 were mingled of many stocks, the largest non-English elements being German and Scotch-Irish--that is, Scotch who had settled for a while in Ulster before emigrating to America. "About one-third of the colonists in 1760," says Professor Channing, "were born outside of America." Crèvecœur's Letters from an American Farmer thus defined the Americans: "They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed that race now called Americans has arisen." The Atlantic seaboard, with a narrow strip inland, was fairly well covered by local communities, differing in blood, in religion, in political organization--a congeries of separate experiments or young utopias, waiting for that most utopian experiment of all, a federal union. But the dominant language of the "promiscuous breed" was English, and in the few real centers of intellectual life the English tradition was almost absolute.
The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this estimate. The Boston News-Letter, begun in 1704, was the first of the journals, if we omit the single issue of Publick Occurrences in the same town in 1690. By 1765 there were nearly fifty colonial newspapers and several magazines. Their influence made for union, in Franklin's sense of that word, and their literary models, like their paper, type, and even ink, were found in London. The New England Courant, established in Boston in 1721 by James Franklin, is full of imitations of the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian. What is more, the Courant boasted of its office collection of books, including Shakespeare, Milton, the Spectator, and Swift's Tale of a Tub. ¹ This was in 1722. If we remember that no allusion to Shakespeare has been discovered in the colonial literature of the seventeenth century, and scarcely an allusion to the Puritan poet Milton, and that the Harvard College Library in 1723 had nothing of Addison, Steele, Bolingbroke, Dryden, Pope, and Swift, and had only recently obtained copies of Milton and Shakespeare, we can appreciate the value of James Franklin's apprenticeship in London. Perhaps we can even forgive him for that attack upon the Mathers which threw the conduct of the Courant, for a brief period, into the hands of his brother Benjamin, whose turn at a London apprenticeship was soon to come.