Ben Franklin had a humble start in life, and he always wanted to make it big.  In the eighteenth century, this meant becoming a gentleman.  And Franklin pursued that goal with a vengeance.

In middle age, he seemed to have achieved it:  he was rich, respected, and famous, and he not only followed the gentlemanly avocation of scientific pursuit, he did rather well at it, gaining additional acclaim.  He was probably the most famous American in the world, and it was no surprise that the Pennsylvania colony sent Franklin to London to prosecute Pennsylvania's various interests.

Franklin had a high time in London, and he made powerful friends.  He really thought he'd made it and was "one of the guys" -- until a scandal I won't go into here, the Hutchinson affair, when Franklin was reminded, forcefully, PUBLICLY, that he was, when push came to shove, just a colonial.  Just expendable.  Just not all that special.  And just not really regarded as a real gentleman after all.

Franklin didn't like that much.  And although in his life he was never held by the bulk of the American people as a genuine patriot and rebel, there was no reconciling him to England, Parliament, or particularly the crown after his public humiliation.

When Franklin was sent to Paris in order to try to gather support from the French for the revolution, he didn't try to play the gentleman card.  He went the other route, putting on a bearskin cap (because this Boston-born, Philadelphia-bred guy was SUCH a frontiersman...!) and hamming it up as a "noble savage."  The French couldn't get enough of it.  Fun!  Saucy!  Amusant!

Franklin-the-gentleman got THE HAND from London.  Franklin-in-fur-cap got exactly what he wanted from the French.  He played by the rules when the rules worked for him.  When they didn't -- it was the results that mattered, not the process!

He was a wily old thing, and if there's anyone I wouldn't want to cross, Franklin and Washington would top my list.

Tax time!  Of course this was a bit of an issue in the Revolutionary War.  And if we have to pay taxes now that we have the right to vote for our representatives directly, we have only our own rhetoric to blame.  ^_^

The Mother Country, meantime, suffered some confusion that among the "English liberties" we demanded was direct representation in Parliament, since such representation wasn't exactly the general rule in England at the time.  Further areas of perplexity:  was it all right for England to pay for our infrastructure, social services, and defense, but magically not all right to try to recoup some of those losses?  Stop muddying the waters and start giving us more face!

Taxation was more a flash-point symbol than a genuine issue in and of itself; Ben Franklin himself dithered on the matter, first reading the mood of his countrymen utterly wrongly (no surprise, he'd been living in London for ages) and positing that only a particular type of tax was offensive.  Nope!  Turns out all of them were!

What was at issue was self-determination, not how many taxes can dance on the head of a pin.

Of course, we didn't like taxes then, and we don't like them now, which made taxation a particularly tasty rallying cry.  But practically the first matter on the docket when Washington came to power was losing some of that depressingly cavernous echo in the federal coffers.  And that meant taxes.  Oh well!