# The Case of Scotland in the Constitutional Debate on the American Colonies: Benjamin Franklin's and Adam Smith's Visions of Empire (1754-1776)

Florence Petroff

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Florence Petroff. The Case of Scotland in the Constitutional Debate on the American Colonies: Benjamin Franklin's and Adam Smith's Visions of Empire (1754-1776). Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines, 2022, N° 173 (4), pp.12-23. 10.3917/rfea.173.0012. hal-05524713

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# The Case of Scotland in the Constitutional Debate on the American Colonies: Benjamin Franklin's and Adam Smith's visions of empire (1754-1776)

FLORENCE PETROFF

**Keywords:**

American Revolution;
British Empire; Albany
Plan; Benjamin
Franklin; Adam Smith;
John Adams; Anglo-
Scottish Union

Avant que les treize colonies d'Amérique du Nord ne deviennent les États-Unis, le désir commun de maintenir un lien pérenne avec la Grande-Bretagne était la norme des deux côtés de l'Atlantique et a conduit à l'élaboration de plusieurs plans d'union. Cet article compare les projets de Benjamin Franklin et d'Adam Smith qui proposaient de réformer l'Empire britannique dans les années 1750 et 1770. Il étudie comment l'Écosse du XVIIe siècle, État souverain lié à l'Angleterre par la Couronne, et l'Union anglo-écossaise établie en 1707 ont servi de modèles et de contre-modèles dans le débat constitutionnel sur l'avenir des colonies américaines.

Research on Scotland's connection with the American Revolution first focused on the possible influence of Scottish philosophy on American revolutionaries (Wills; Sher & Smitten 11-12) and on the Scottish disappointment of the American Revolution (Fagerstrom; Edwards & Shepperson). More recently, historians have explored the involvement of British Highlanders in the American Revolutionary War (Mackillop; Dziennik). The case of Scotland, which negotiated its status through the 1707 Treaty of Union, played a part in the constitutional debate from the 1750s to the 1770s. As Ned Landsman has pointed out, it was not central, but it inspired political thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic, many of whom were either Scots or Scottish-Americans (Landsman, 1995 297-298; Yirush
## THE CASE OF SCOTLAND IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEBATE...

195-200; Petroff). Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith fathered two of the most elaborate plans for a transatlantic union in 1754 and 1776 respectively, and discussed granting the colonists direct representation in Parliament. This article compares these plans and explores how Franklin, Smith, and other writers used the case of Scotland either as a model or counter model in their discussion of the status of the American colonies.<fnref n="1" /> It contends that their wish to reform the empire was based on a shared provincial understanding of the British Atlantic world and a desire to secure unity among all Britons, but it also demonstrates that they drew on opposed visions of empire that reflect the constitutional grounds of the dispute between the American Patriots and Britain.

## Benjamin Franklin's Dream of a Transatlantic Union

Long before the ignition of the imperial crisis, Benjamin Franklin had been among the few who considered incorporating the thirteen colonies into the British state. Franklin's dream of a transatlantic union first emerged in the early 1750s when he discussed the association of the colonies, in order to improve their defense against the French and the Natives, with Archibald Kennedy and Cadwallader Colden, two Scottish-born prominent colonists and British officials in the colony of New York (Tonks; Yirush 200-205, Landsman, 1995 307-308). As a member of the Pennsylvania delegation to the Albany Congress that met in June 1754, Franklin took part in the attempt to build a common league of defense between seven colonies and the Iroquois confederation against the French. Franklin's ambition stretched beyond the requests made by Lord Halifax, the President of the Board of Trade in London, to sign a single treaty with the natives. In cooperation with Thomas Pownall, Thomas Hutchinson, Archibald Kennedy, and others, he conceived a plan of union of all the British colonies in North America connecting them as a whole with Britain. A Grand Council composed of delegates sent by the colonial assemblies meeting once a year and a president general appointed by the Crown would manage defense, trade, territorial expansion, and interaction with the natives. To Franklin's great regret, the plan was rejected by both the Crown and the colonial assemblies (Goodwin 59-61). In the wake of the failure of this attempt at union, Franklin and William Shirley—then serving as governor of Massachusetts—further discussed

<footnote n="1">1. Benjamin Franklin visited Scotland twice, in 1759 and 1771, while staying in Britain (1759-1775). There is no surviving correspondence with Adam Smith but there is evidence that they occasionally met (Goodwin, 119; Nolan, 63, 72, 200-1).</footnote>
FLORENCE PETROFF

the idea (Labaree 5: 441-447, 449-451; 13: 118-120; Yirush 206-207).<fnref n="2" />
Franklin agreed with the suggestion made by Shirley that American
representatives be sent to the Westminster Parliament, provided that, first,
the colonies should be allowed a number of representatives that would
give them enough weight to protect their interests and, secondly, that all
restrictions on trade and on the development of manufactures in the colo-
nies be repealed. He thus promoted a political and economic union bet-
ween Britain and its English-speaking colonies in North America,
granting the colonists equal rights with other Britons and uniting them
in a single nation:

I should hope too, that by such an [sic] union, the people of Great Britain and the People of the Colonies would learn to consider themselves, not as belonging to different Communities with different Interests, but to one Community with one Interest, which I imagine would contribute to strengthen the whole, and greatly lessen the danger of future separations.<fnref n="3" />

(Labaree, 5: 443-447)

Franklin thus imagined that the colonies could negotiate a status
that bore some resemblance to the one Scotland had obtained in 1707.
The incorporating union gave Scotland only a small representation in the
British Parliament but offered Scottish merchants full access to English
and colonial markets. Scotsmen were allowed to make their way into the
army, the Church of England, the imperial administration, and govern-
ment. A new North British identity was progressively forged after the
Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746, while the economic benefits of the
Union started to increase substantially in the 1750s. The North Britons,
as many Lowland Scots described themselves, maintained their specific
Scottish culture as well as the independence of their church, while promo-
ting a degree of Anglicization (Kidd, 1996 366; 2008 134-136, 145-148,
Landsman, 2016 112-113, 131). By 1766, Franklin was better acquainted
with Scotland, which he had visited in 1759. He had befriended a number
of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, notably David Hume, Alexander
Dick, and Lord Kames (Sher 185-188). He viewed Scotland as another
province in the British Empire and Edinburgh as a thriving and inspiring
British cultural center. However, he noted that America could not be

<footnote n="2">2. The correspondence between Franklin and Shirley was published in newspapers some ten years later, in the midst of the Stamp Act crisis, but the original copies haven't survived. Gordon Wood suggests the letters might have been written but never sent (Wood 78).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3. James Otis had supported the principle of American representation in the British Parliament on the ground that a united empire would be more powerful, but renounced to the idea long before Franklin (Otis 30, 36-38; Wood 115-116, Landsman, 2016 108).</footnote>
## THE CASE OF SCOTLAND IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEBATE...

compared to Scotland, the main difference lying in the growing strength of the colonies thanks to opportunities of territorial expansion in the west and a fast-increasing population. America would soon be as powerful as Britain and might even overtake her, Franklin warned (Labaree, 14: 62-71; 15: 238). Ever since 1754, Franklin had been claiming that the integration of the colonists into Parliament would not entail the abolition of the colonial assemblies in the same way as Scotland's Parliament had disappeared in 1707. Quite to the contrary, Franklin promoted the creation of a representative body proceeding from the assemblies of each colony. As Englishmen, the colonists were entitled to a representative council with the ability to tax, he insisted in his letters to Shirley, and should not be treated as a "conquer'd people" (5: 443-447). In Franklin's view, being directly represented in Parliament did not imply parliamentary taxation on the colonies, as British pamphleteers suggested.<fnref n="4" /> "It is essential to English liberty, [that] the subject should not be taxed but by his own consent or the consent of his elected representatives," he maintained. Franklin held that taxation would be partly transferred to the Great Council but would remain in the hands of the colonial assemblies for the most part (5: 397). He hoped to tighten the bonds between America and Britain but did not contemplate an incorporating union like Great Britain. His ideal of empire was a confederacy of distinct and equal states securing a link between each separate English-speaking North American colony and Britain, so as to set in stone America's self-governance by virtue of its colonial assemblies (17:160). When reflecting back on the Albany plan in 1789, Franklin noted that if the plan had been adopted, the colonies might have remained within the empire for another century (5: 417). By 1767 however, it was already too late, as he wrote his friend Lord Kames, because of the series of abuses emanating from Parliament that started with the Stamp Act (14: 62-71). From the late 1760s, the case of Scotland, a sovereign state united to England by a common sovereign between 1603 and 1707, provided a much more attractive model for American Patriots. It was historical evidence that the king could simultaneously rule several states.

## Seventeenth-century Scotland in the American Dispute

By 1768, Franklin's position was that Parliament had no authority over the thirteen colonies whatsoever and that the colonies should be

<footnote n="4">4. Thomas Crowley (c.1713–1787) first developed his idea of an imperial parliament in the *Public Ledger* under the pseudonym of *Amor Patriae* (June 1766-March 1776) and later in his *Letters and Dissertations On Various Subjects* (York). Thomas Pownall also publis-</footnote>
FLORENCE PETROFF

considered “so many separate states, only subject to the same King, as England and Scotland were before the Union.” (15: 74-78, 233-237). He had been in contact with the London political world long enough to be well acquainted with the notion of Parliamentary sovereignty that had prevailed since the Glorious Revolution (Dickinson 189-210). Being aware that the Patriots’ rejection of this tenet of the British constitution was the main issue in the Anglo-American controversy, he invoked seventeenth-century Scotland as a case in point proving that the king could constitutionally be the sovereign of two distinct states. Franklin compared the colonial assemblies to the Scottish Parliament which had been totally independent from the Parliament of England (17: 160; 18: 25).<fnref n="5" /> American Loyalists held the opposite view that Parliament had supreme authority for “it is impossible there should be two independent legislatures in one and the same state” as governor Hutchinson put it (Hutchinson 336-342). Samuel Adams and other members of the House of Representatives of Massachusetts replied that the Crown alone had granted the first colonists their lands and their charters and that, in accordance with the latter, the colonies had “all the powers necessary to constitute them free and distinct states” not annexed to the realm of England. The leaders of the House consented to Hutchinson’s remark that “the two Legislative bodies will make two governments as distinct as the kingdoms of England and Scotland, before the union,” but added that they might remain connected by a common Sovereign, and that the authority of Parliament did not stretch beyond England (Adams, Mr. S.).

The argument was further developed by John Adams and Daniel Leonard—a lawyer close to Hutchinson—in the Novanglus-Massachuset- tensis dispute. Massachusettensis (Daniel Leonard) published seventeen letters in *The Massachusetts Gazette* from 12 December 1774 to 3 April 1775 that Novanglus (John Adams) answered in the *Boston Gazette*.<fnref n="6" /> If the colonies were separated from Great Britain as Scotland and England were before 1707, the common connection with the king would not be sufficient, Leonard argued. There would be no union, each colonial assembly acting as a Parliament and defending the interest of its state,

<footnote>had a treaty on the empire which pleaded for centralization, arguing that the colonies had to be fully integrated into the kingdom and Parliament, the people and the government willing or not, for they were all part of a large maritime empire (Pownall xiv-xvi).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5. Franklin’s enthusiasm for the Scottish intelligentsia faded away in the mid-1770s when he realized that the Scottish elites generally disapproved of the American Revolution (Sher 190-191).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6. Massachusettensis was identified as Jonathan Sewall by mistake in the 1819 edition of the collection of the Novanglus pamphlets (Calhoon).</footnote>
THE CASE OF SCOTLAND IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEBATE...

while the increased prerogative of the king of thirteen American states would threaten the balance of power between the Crown and the representatives of the people. In other words, a confederation of states would be unconstitutional (*The Massachusetts Gazette*, 2 January 1775, 1). Contrary to what the Loyalists claimed, it was the authority that Parliament pretended to have over the colonies which was not consistent with the British Constitution, Adams replied. Seventeenth-century Scotland provided the case of a state sharing the same king as England and yet free from the dominance of the English Parliament:

> As to holding [our ancestors'] lands, surely they did not hold their lands of lords and commons. If they agreed to hold their lands of the king, this did not subject them to English lords and commons, any more than the inhabitants of Scotland holding their lands of the same king, subjected them.

(Adams, John 136)

John Adams considered the colonies to be free and distinct states from Great Britain since most of them preexisted the creation of Great Britain by England and Scotland in 1707. Admitting that the English Parliament governed the colonies, MPs could not have shared their power with the Scots without the consent of the colonists. As the colonies were not part of the Treaty of Union, they were totally independent from the British Parliament, Adams concluded. They remained linked to Britain by the king and by commerce, as long as the British acknowledged the autonomy of the thirteen colonies (79).

Franklin had identified the roots of the misunderstanding between America and Britain as early as 1768 when he stated that the Glorious Revolution, which had given birth to the principle of the supremacy of Parliament, brought no change to the “nature of the union then subsisting between England and Scotland: nor indeed between England and her colonies” (15: 233-237). This implied that Parliamentary sovereignty did not extend to America. The Patriots’ resistance to attempts by Parliament to impose its authority over them was largely based on an idealized past, described as a time when the colonies solely depended on the king who had granted them their charters whereas in reality there had been a long history of tensions between the colonies and the metropole starting in the 1740s through which colonial assemblies had gained more power (Greene 13-16, 127-128; Yirush 196-199). Scotland united to England by the Crown and remaining a sovereign state in the seventeenth century, like the state of Hanover in the eighteenth, was a precedent that could mirror the case of the colonies according to the American Patriots. While in 1776, the idea of a union between Britain and the thirteen colonies
FLORENCE PETROFF

collapsed in America, Adam Smith articulated his own dream of a trans-
atlantic union, which was much more comparable to the incorporating
Anglo-Scottish union than Franklin's Albany plan.

Adam Smith's Ideal of Empire: The Full Integration of America
into the Anglo-Scottish Union

It was no coincidence that Adam Smith published his second great work, *An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations*, while the imperial crisis was reaching its climax in March 1776, for he had been delaying publication on account of the conflict. The essay not only theorizes economic processes but also tackles the issue of the future of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic (WoN II: 136-226; Skinner 75; Phillipson 208-213). In response to the American rebellion, Adam Smith imagined a fiscal, commercial, and political union including England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the North American colonies. His plan proceeded from the wish of "extending the British system of taxation to all the different provinces of the empire inhabited by people of either British or European extraction" and this could not be achieved without granting "a fair and equal representation of all those different provinces" and freedom of trade (WoN II: 535-536). Like Franklin in the 1750s, Smith imagined the empire as a community of Britons who all enjoyed the same commercial and political liberties. He claimed the constitution seemed "to be imperfect" without American representation. Yet his main ground for granting this new status to America was the cost of protection for colonies that did not contribute any tax to the British government. He pointed out that the profit British merchants made thanks to their monopoly on enumerated commodities neither benefited Britain as a whole nor counterbalanced the cost of protection. What Smith had in mind was imperial centralization under the authority of Parliament. Although he was considered a friend of the American Patriots, he expres-sed the same suspicion of the colonial assemblies as Loyalist Daniel Leo-nard and he believed that they were unable to promote the general interest on the scale of the empire (II: 175-204). He suggested the addition of 50 to 60 American MPs to the House of Commons, considering that it would satisfy the ambition of the American political elite and counterba-lance the loss of power in their assemblies that he anticipated (II: 205-208). He adduced the example of the Roman republic in 88 BC, although he drew no parallel with Scotland.<fnref n="7" /> Adam Smith was well aware that the

<footnote n="7">7. The following year, William Barron, a Scottish professor, published a pamphlet calling for the extension of the union to the thirteen colonies that was widely inspired by *The Wealth of Nations*. Barron, unlike Smith, openly based his reflection on the success of the Anglo-Scottish Union (Barron 146-147, Petroff).</footnote>
THE CASE OF SCOTLAND IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEBATE...

American MPs would find themselves in a situation similar to the 45
Scottish representatives out of 558 and would consequently have very
little weight in British politics. This is the reason why Smith insisted that
the number of MPs should be proportional to the produce of the taxes
of each province, including Great Britain. He foresaw that American colo-
nists would progressively impose their control over the empire (II: 536).
Like Franklin, he took into consideration that the colonies were growing
faster than Britain in population and wealth. He even expected that at
some point the seat of the empire would be transferred from London to
North America (II: 209, Landsman, 2016 126-127). Two years later, he
still believed that the Americans could be brought to accept such a centra-
lized union, provided that Britain inflicted them a few military defeats
and did not take the Declaration of Independence as irrevocable.<fnref n="8" /> Howev-
er, he was aware that his plan was not popular among the British "if
you except here and there a solitary philosopher like myself". A partition
of the colonies, some remaining in the empire and others becoming sove-
reign states, seemed then most likely (*Thoughts* 380-385). Smith developed
a somewhat pragmatic approach based on wide-range reflections about
trade, debts, and taxes across the British Atlantic world. His contribution
to the constitutional debate regarding the colonies was part of a purely
British discussion opposing British pamphleteers on the issue of possible
ways for Britain to maintain the colonies within the empire.

Conclusion

At a distance of two decades, Benjamin Franklin and Adam Smith
shared a common vision of a transatlantic union that would integrate the
colonies into the British state and grant the colonists direct representation
in Parliament as well as free trade and equal rights with other Britons.
Their projects were to some extent based on a provincial understanding
of the empire that implied equality among all Britons across the English-
speaking world, thus creating a British community of freemen as opposed
to foreigners living under tyranny.<fnref n="9" /> Their plans pursued the same general
goal, yet through different paths. Adam Smith's suggestion of an imperial
Parliament aimed to make the colonies contribute to the imperial tax

<footnote n="8">8. Emma Macleod has shown that this opinion was shared by most Britons. Even the radicals did not come to terms with the loss of the thirteen colonies in 1776, some not even before 1778 (Macleod 12).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9. I follow Ned Landsman, who suggests that Scots and Scots-Irish officials and thin-
kers promoted the vision of a commercial empire incorporating all Britons wherever they
lived, that differed from metropolitan views (Landsman, 1995 299).</footnote>
FLORENCE PETROFF

system that he believed to be a prerequisite for a global power. He imagi-
ned an incorporating union in which all powers would lie in the central
government and where colonial assemblies would renounce sovereignty,
as the Scottish Parliament had in 1707.<fnref n="10" /> Centralization and integration
of the colonies into the British fiscal-military state would strengthen the
empire, which he famously described as “the project of an empire” (II:
550). Conversely, Benjamin Franklin never promoted centralization, even
when considering the option of American representation in Parliament.
Parliament was not supposed to replace the colonial assemblies in Fran-
klin’s plan but to cooperate with them and give colonists a say in imperial
affairs, so that their interests would be taken into account. Franklin and
other Patriots did not have an incorporating union in mind but an impe-
rial confederation of distinct states under the authority of the Crown, like
Scotland and England in the seventeenth century.

Franklin and Smith were both aware that the growing wealth and
power of the thirteen colonies challenged the relationship between Britain
and America. They shared the belief that a reform granting equality to the
American colonists was the way to tackle the issue and to ensure that Bri-
tons on both sides of the Atlantic constitute a single nation. Even though
their respective plans of union met with little enthusiasm and remained lar-
gely speculative, Franklin and Smith embodied two visions of empire that
were commonplace in America and in Britain (Gould 143-145). Adam
Smith's contribution to the American controversy exemplifies how the
Scots had devised a way to be simultaneously Scottish and British in the
second half of the eighteenth century, while Franklin wished to find a way
to combine Americanness—which implied a degree of autonomy—with
Britishness. Franklin did not fulfill his dream, but the creation of a federal
union after 1776 ultimately stemmed from his ideal—which he shared with
other Patriots—of a confederation of states (Marienstras 290).

<footnote n="10">10. The 1706-1707 campaign of addresses against the treaty of union reveals that opposition to an incorporating union was widespread among the Scots. Other options, such as a confederacy that would maintain the Scottish Parliament, were favored by many, notably Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, James Hodges, and George Ridpath. However, by the second half of the eighteenth century, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, including Adam Smith, embraced unionism. They considered the British King-in-Parliament system a major improvement in comparison with the former unicameral Scottish Parliament. Scottish support for the Union was also based on the wish to integrate and to contribute to the growth of the empire (Bowie 1-32; Kidd, 2008 68-72, 146; Robertson 31-5; Landsman, 1995 299-301; Smith, Craig 106).</footnote>
# THE CASE OF SCOTLAND IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL DEBATE...

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