Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

itterly, denouncing it as "against the rights and privileges of Englishmen.
. . ." The Rhode Island legislature could not forgive its delegate
Stephen Hopkins for signing the proposal. A large majority of the Boston
town meeting voted against the plan, Dr. William Clarke perceptively denouncing
it to Franklin himself as a "scheme for destroying the liberties
and privileges of every British subject upon the continent." In general, the
respective colonies took no notice of the plan. Even Governor Shirley
opposed it bitterly, not of course because the central government would be
too powerful but because for Shirley it would be far too weak. In particular,
the provision for an elected legislature was to Shirley viciously democratic
and destructive of the royal prerogative. Shirley urged that Parliament tax
the colonies and that the central legislature be all appointed by the Crown.
Governor Morris of Pennsylvania also scented a dangerous republicanism in
the plan, as well as the destruction of Crown authority. He also insisted
that a union of colonies must permit absolute dictation over the army by
the supergovernment. Discussion in England of^the plan, and of the whole
problem of imperial relations with the colonies, was cast aside by the immediate
crisis of the rout of Washington at Fort Necessity.
Franklin's desperate gamble on the Albany Plan stemmed from his fear
that Virginia, with its vague and grandiose charter claims, would be able
to conquer and keep control of the Ohio Valley land. Pennsylvania's Quaker
Assembly would prevent that colony from contesting the spoils, but a central
supergovernment over the colonies would suffer from no such limits or
scruples. Hence Franklin's provision in the Albany Plan that the supergovernment
have the power to abrogate existing colonial claims to the
western lands, and to create there new governments and land grants. After
it was obvious that the Albany Plan would fail, Franklin unsuccessfully tried
again: this time to forestall Virginia by creating two new colonies in the
upper Ohio Valley. In this plan, Franklin was joined by two of his associates
at the Albany congress—Sir William Johnson and Thomas Pownall, secretary
to the governor of New York and brother of the influential John
Pownall, secretary of the Board of Trade.
With Henry Fox now war secretary and Henry Pelham dead, the English
war party had been considerably strengthened, and Cumberland, Fox, Halifax,
and Pitt managed partly to push and partly to circumvent Newcastle, and
to induce Britain to agree to send two regiments of regulars to America
under General Edward Braddock as commander-in-chief of the English forces
on the continent. Britain was now committed even more heavily to aggressive
war against New France. Braddock's instructions were to capture the
critical French forts south of the St. Lawrence, and Henry Fox trumpeted
these aims in the press in order to provoke the French into a general war.
In that way, Fox and Cumberland expected to use a conquest of the Ohio
Valley, and limited aggression against Canada, as the back door to war against
France on the continent of Europe.
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