Benjamin Franklin's Savage Eloquence: Hoaxes from the Press at Passy, 1782

ALMOST as soon as he arrived at l'Hotel de Valentinois, JacquesDonatien Le Ray de Chaumont's lovely estate at Passy along the Seine and in sight of Paris, Franklin started arranging his household for a long stay. Among the items ordered were large supplies of food, along with equipment for domestic and personal use, including a coffee roaster and mill, a sugar grater, and a feather duster that would be used at Franklin's desk.1 And among his goals nearly from the start: to purchase and run a press at Passy. Within months of his late February 1777 arrival, Franklin set about finding type for a press, which he planned on setting up for the printing of congressional and other papers both public and private. Probably during the summer of that year, he approached the famous typefounding family, the Fourniers, about getting type for his press, and special type began arriving as early as September.2 In his first years there, Franklin worked hard to establish a press. He even persuaded a typefounder to move and set up a foundry there.3 By 1782, the Passy press was very well appointed, with standard English and French fonts, with special fonts the Fourniers had made explicitly for his Passy press, and with fonts that his typefounder, a man named Hemery, created.4 Nearly all of these fonts would come into play as Franklin prepared an infrequently discussed but brilliantly satirical, splendidly printed broadsheet, the subject of this essay - a purported Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle (dated Boston, March 12 but printed before 22 April 1782).5 The Supplement deserves careful scrutiny for both its qualities as a printed artifact and its qualities as satire crafted during a particularly difficult - and frustrating - time in Franklin's protracted diplomatic mission. Although the Supplement is rarely discussed in a printing craft context, Franklin's printing of the Supplement reminds us of the delight he took in creating hoax or faked documents. That he chose to create and print the Supplement at a particularly difficult time in his diplomacy - on the eve of the delivery to the British administration of Franklin's most complete set of negotiating points for peace - suggests the extent to which the printer's craft challenged his mind and rewarded his emotional life in ways that positively affected his sense of confidence and well-being as an intellectual, a politician, and a diplomat on behalf of British North America. From his earliest years as a printer and propagandist, Franklin took to his press at times crucial to the swaying of public opinion on issues that mattered to him. Given that the Supplement's contents might have left him chargeable for libel, if not for treason, the sleight of hand Franklin engaged in when cobbling the printed text together from several fonts he owned had to have been particularly onerous, but also exhilarating. The broadside Supplement that Franklin ended up circulating contained two different articles, one per side, along with several advertisements. The recto article (on the front side) related to purported wartime atrocities fomented by the British and their Indian allies. The verso article (on the back side) spoke to the problem of wartime imprisonment of colonial Americans and Franklin's consistently frustrated efforts to get the prisoners released. The supposed newspaper issue, in effect an extra, never existed: as a material artifact, it was a hoax newspaper. Its articles are literary hoaxes. The first article, which has received a small bit of attention from those interested in Indian affairs, purports to be a letter by New England militia officer Captain Samuel Gerrish, who is transmitting a letter and series of packages that had been intercepted and seized in their delivery from one James Craufurd to General Haldimand, the British governor of Canada. Franklin's hoax letter includes remarkably violent and ugly representations of American Indians (Iroquoians, Senecas, particularly) alongside uglier representations of British imperial attitudes toward Britons in North America. …

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