Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

thermore, Pitt himself had strong family connections with West Indies
planters.
To counter the imperialist propaganda, the Newcastle peace forces enlisted
the services of William Burke, secretary of the newly conquered
Guadeloupe. Burke rose to the occasion with a trenchant and popular
pamphlet published in January 1760. Burke recalled the original war aim
as stated in November 1754: the limited conquest of the upper Ohio
Valley east of the Wabash. He suggested a return to these limited war
aims, the retention of only Guadeloupe and the upper Ohio Valley, and
the return of Canada to France. In this way "proper limits" would be established
to English conquest, and peace could be concluded quickly and
amicably. Several other Whig pamphlets joined Burke in asking for the
return of Canada, one of which was also printed in Boston.
The imperialists counterattacked with another flood of pamphlets in
February and March, insisting on keeping Canada and hence implicitly on
continuing the war indefinitely. The major imperialist reply was the influential
pamphlet by Benjamin Franklin and Richard Jackson, The Interest
of Great Britain Considered, published in the spring of 1760 and reprinted
that year in Boston and Philadelphia. Franklin, agent of the Pennsylvania
legislature in England, was a friend of Bedford, Halifax, and Pitt, but his
closest associates were among the high Tory clique, whose leading luminaries
were Lord Bute and the Prince of Wales. All shared the goal of increased
centralized royal control over the American colonies, and Franklin
also aimed at royal replacement of proprietary government in Pennsylvania.
As the pamphlet war began to brew at the turn of 1760, Franklin had
written to his close friend Lord Kames of his gushing enthusiasm for a grandiose
British Empire: "As ... a Briton I have long been of opinion that the
foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie
in America." Kames, the head of the high Tory Scottish faction that was
always and ever subservient to the Crown and the royal prerogative, commissioned
Franklin to write his major imperialist pamphlet. In this work,
Franklin held out to the British the usual imperialist visions of being a huge
naval power and of vast markets for British manufactures in a British
Canada. Himself heavily engaged in speculation in western land, Franklin
trumpeted the virtues of cheap virgin land to the British Empire. Grateful
for Franklin's allegiance, the Tories were soon to make his son William a
baronet and a governor of New Jersey, while Oxford University, the intellectual
center of the Tories, granted Franklin an honorary degree.
Newcastle and the Whigs had been able, in late 1759, to force the reluctant
Pitt into peace negotiations with France. By early 1760, England
and France were very close to agreement on a mild peace that would
have returned the bulk of Canada and Guadeloupe to French hands, while
ceding the upper Ohio Valley and Nova Scotia to England, and demolish-
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