The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (102 page)

Howe appreciated this vote of confidence, although his men did not. “We walked up to the house between lines of guards of grenadiers, looking as fierce as ten furies,” Adams wrote, “and making all the grimaces and gestures and motions of their muskets with bayonets fixed.” The admiral did the best he could under trying circumstances. “The house had been the habitation of military guards, and was as dirty as a stable. But his Lordship had prepared a large handsome room, by spreading a carpet of moss and green sprigs from bushes and shrubs in the neighbourhood, till he had made it not only wholesome but romantically elegant, and he entertained us with good claret, good bread, cold ham, tongues and mutton.”

Six months earlier Howe’s efforts might have succeeded. Howe explained the terms of his commission from the king, and asserted that these afforded an ample basis for peace. “I also gave them to understand,” the admiral reported to Lord Germain afterward, “that His Majesty was graciously disposed to a revision of such of his royal instructions as might have laid too much restraint upon their legislation, and to concur in a revisal of any of the plantation laws by which the colonists might be aggrieved.”

If this offer meant what it appeared to mean, it amounted to everything Franklin and most other Americans had been saying for years was all they wanted: a return to the status quo as it existed before 1765. But the offer came too late. The colonies were no longer colonies but independent states. “The three gentlemen were very explicit in their opinions that the associated colonies would not accede to any peace or alliance but as free and independent states,” Howe recorded.

This essentially ended the conversation. Yet Howe was a gentleman, and a friend of Franklin, and he would not simply turn away his guests. As he had told Franklin in England, now he explained to the others that he felt great affection for America, not least on account of the generosity of Massachusetts in paying to erect a statue in Westminster Abbey of his elder brother, who had been killed in the war with France. He said he felt for America as for a brother, and if America should fall he would lament it like the loss of a brother.

“Dr. Franklin,” Adams recorded, “with an easy air and a collected countenance, a bow, a smile and all that naivetee which sometimes appeared in his conversation and is often observed in his writings, replied, ‘My Lord, we will do our utmost endeavours to save your Lordship that mortification.’”

23
Salvation in Paris
1776–78

Before the meeting with the American commissioners adjourned, Howe remarked, “I suppose you will endeavour to give us employment in Europe.”

This was precisely what Franklin was endeavoring to do. From the start of the war Franklin and other American leaders had recognized that their success might well hinge on the attitude of other European countries, especially France, toward the conflict. Four times in the last eighty years France had fought against Britain; a fifth time might free America from London’s grasp.

In November 1775 the Congress appointed Franklin to a Committee of Secret Correspondence. His fellow committeemen were John Dickinson, Benjamin Harrison, John Jay, and Thomas Johnson; their job was to seek foreign support for the war. “It would be agreeable to Congress to know the disposition of the foreign powers towards us,” Franklin wrote on behalf of the committee to Arthur Lee in London. “We need not add that great circumspection and impenetrable secrecy are necessary.” The same day Franklin wrote in his own voice to the son of the Spanish King Charles. The infante, a noted classicist, had sent Franklin a copy of his translation of Sallust; Franklin took the opportunity to thank the prince for the gift. He apologized that he had nothing comparable to return. “Perhaps, however,” he went on, “the proceedings of our American Congress, just published, may be a subject of some curiosity at your court. I therefore take the liberty of sending your Highness a copy, with some other papers which contain accounts of the success wherewith Providence has lately favoured us. Therein your wise politicians may contemplate the first efforts of a rising state, which seems likely soon to act a part of some importance on the stage of human affairs, and furnish materials for a future Sallust.”

This was a bold statement seven months before the Declaration of Independence, but hardly bolder than Franklin’s concurrent actions. During the same week Franklin and the Committee of Secret Correspondence met covertly—by night, in the Philadelphia Carpenters’ Hall rather than the State House—with one Monsieur Bonvouloir, young aristocrat sent from the French court to spy out the American situation. Franklin and the others asked whether France was well disposed toward the colonies and whether she might sell them needed arms and ammunition. Bonvouloir, without avowing any formal connection to the French government, suggested that indeed his country wished the Americans well, and that weapons might be made available.

Concurrently Franklin, as a member of the Secret Committee (he could have been forgiven for confusing his secret committees), conducted negotiations with two French merchants who were not agents of King Louis but intimated they were. This pair hoped to profit from the Americans’ predicament by selling them the matériel they needed. The Secret Committee supplied them a list of the Continental Army’s requirements and sent them on their way, hoping for the best.

Not long thereafter the Committee of Secret Correspondence decided to act more forthrightly. Franklin approached Silas Deane, a former colleague on the Secret Committee who had lost his place there
when the Connecticut assembly, for reasons best known to itself, refused to return him to Congress after the end of 1775. Since then he had donned the frock coat of the merchant, which seemed to Franklin appropriate apparel for an American agent. “On your arrival in France, you will for some time be engaged in the business of providing goods for the Indian trade,” Franklin explained, after Deane agreed to serve the Congress in a new capacity. “This will give good countenance to your appearing in the character of a merchant, which we wish you continually to retain among the French in general, it being probable that the court of France may not like it should be known publicly that any agent from the Colonies is in that country.” In addition Deane would carry letters from Franklin to some of Franklin’s French friends; this would appear perfectly legitimate even as it allowed the envoy to contact influential people in Paris. “You will find in M. Dubourg [Franklin’s French editor] a man prudent, faithful, secret, intelligent in affairs, and capable of giving you very sage advice.”

But Dubourg would chiefly be a conduit to the key personage in French foreign affairs, the foreign minister Comte de Vergennes. At the earliest possible moment Deane should apply for an audience with Vergennes—“acquainting him that you are in France upon business of the American Congress, in the character of a merchant, having something to communicate to him that may be mutually beneficial to France and the North American colonies.” Most pressing was the need of the colonies for arms and ammunition. Deane should point out to Vergennes that France was the first country to which the colonies were making application and “that if we should, as there is a great appearance we shall, come to a total separation from Britain, France would be looked upon as the power whose friendship it would be fittest for us to obtain and cultivate.” Britain had benefited handsomely from the commerce of the American colonies; France might inherit that benefit in the likely event of American independence.

Franklin specified what the colonies required: “clothing and arms for twenty-five thousand men, with a suitable quantity of ammunition, and one hundred field pieces.” Ideally the French government would provide the colonies sufficient credit to purchase these items, with repayment to come from Franco-American trade. Less ideal, but acceptable, would be for the French government to allow Deane to arrange private financing. Once purchased, the items “would make a cargo which it might be well to secure by a convoy of two or three ships of war.”

This was asking much, as Franklin knew. But there was more. Should
Vergennes appear sympathetic, Deane ought to inquire “whether, if the Colonies should be forced to form themselves into an independent state, France would probably acknowledge them as such, receive their ambassadors, enter into any treaty or alliance with them?”

The premise in this question was the sticker. France was willing to grant the Americans a modest amount of money simply for the nuisance they caused Britain; in May 1776 Louis approved an appropriation of 1 million livres. But this amount, while numerically impressive, would not keep the Continental Army in boots and bullets long. France refused to plunge deeper until the Americans proved their willingness and ability to see their task to its end.

The willingness came with the Declaration of Independence, which was a document written for foreign readers as much as for Americans. The ability was more problematic. The collapse of the Americans’ Canadian offensive, followed by Washington’s defeat on Long Island, left the French and other Europeans with grave doubts the Americans would last another season of fighting.

The Americans were caught in a cruel trap. They could not win without French backing, but they could not gain French backing without showing they could win. The Congress, desperate, directed Franklin to Paris.

His purpose was the same as that of Deane (who would join him, and Arthur Lee, on a three-man diplomatic commission): to obtain arms and an alliance. The former would be paid for with promises, the latter extorted with threats. Just two weeks earlier Franklin had informed Lord Howe that reunion with Britain was beyond consideration. Now he was authorized to threaten just such a reunion, to spur France to prevent it. “It will be proper for you,” read his instructions, “to press for the immediate and explicit declaration of France in our favour, upon a suggestion that a reunion with Great Britain may be the consequence of a delay.”

For a man of
seventy, suffering from gout and assorted lesser afflictions, to leave his home in the middle of a war, to cross a wintry sea patrolled by enemy warships whose commanders could be counted on to know him even if they knew nary another American face, was no small undertaking. John Adams declined nomination to Franklin’s commission; Thomas Jefferson rebuffed election. Yet Franklin had made his decision that America must be free, and he was determined to pay whatever cost
his country required. “I have only a few years to live,” he told Benjamin Rush, “and I am resolved to devote them to the work that my fellow citizens deem proper for me; or speaking as old-clothes dealers do of a remnant of goods, ‘You shall have me for what you please.’”

Crossing the Atlantic with the old man were his two grandsons, Temple Franklin and Benny Bache. Temple’s presence reflected a family tragedy, the final estrangement between Franklin and William. Since his arrival back from London in May 1775, Franklin had seen his son but a handful of times. The first meeting, the one that set the tone for the others, occurred at Joseph Galloway’s estate in Bucks County, outside Philadelphia. Long Franklin’s ally against the Pennsylvania proprietors, Galloway had drifted away on the quarrel with Britain—or perhaps Franklin had drifted from Galloway. Galloway tried to span the gap between the colonies and England by proposing a plan of imperial union; though initially heard with respect, the plan was later shouted down in the rising clamor for independence, and the author was targeted for death threats. One grim morning he woke to find a noose on his doorstep. William Franklin of course was persona non grata anywhere near the Congress; as the prime representative of the Crown in New Jersey, he was feeling increasingly isolated even in his own province.