Our answers, as well as his messages, were often tart, and sometimes
indecently abusive; and, as he knew I wrote for the Assembly,
one might have imagined that, when we met, we could hardly avoid
cutting throats; but he was so good-natur'd a man that no personal
difference between him and me was occasion'd by the contest, and we
often din'd together.
One afternoon, in the height of this public quarrel, we met in
the street. "Franklin," says he, "you must go home with me and spend
the evening; I am to have some company that you will like;" and,
taking me by the arm, he led me to his house. In gay conversation
over our wine, after supper, he told us, jokingly, that he much
admir'd the idea of Sancho Panza, who, when it was proposed to give
him a government, requested it might be a government of blacks,
as then, if he could not agree with his people, he might sell them.
One of his friends, who sat next to me, says, "Franklin, why
do you continue to side with these damn'd Quakers? Had not you
better sell them? The proprietor would give you a good price."
"The governor," says I, "has not yet blacked them enough."
He, indeed, had labored hard to blacken the Assembly in all
his messages, but they wip'd off his coloring as fast as he
laid it on, and plac'd it, in return, thick upon his own face;
so that, finding he was likely to be negrofied himself, he, as well
as Mr. Hamilton, grew tir'd of the contest, and quitted the government.
<13>These public quarrels were all at bottom owing to the proprietaries,
our hereditary governors, who, when any expense was to be incurred
for the defense of their province, with incredible meanness instructed
their deputies to pass no act for levying the necessary taxes,
unless their vast estates were in the same act expressly excused;
and they had even taken bonds of these deputies to observe
such instructions.
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