The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (112 page)

Washington opted for the last. Foraging parties were drawn from those with shoes and trousers and the strength to stand. The pickings were slim in that part of Pennsylvania, which was crowded with refugees—including both the Congress and the Bache family. So the parties were sent to other parts of the state, and into New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Despite the urgings of the Congress, Washington hesitated to seize what he required, lest the people turn against the revolutionary cause. Some of his subordinates were less fastidious, arguing that in the case of New Jersey and Delaware, at any rate, those states were infested with Loyalists who would not have supported the revolutionary cause even if it came with kid gloves and cash.

In camp, Washington attempted to maintain morale by keeping the men busy. Baron von Steuben arrived with his letter from Franklin and commenced drilling the troops. He lacked English beyond the basics, but his prestige as an officer in the army of Frederick the Great counted for much where military professionals were few. Discipline improved, and with it the mood in camp. (Certain cultural problems would persist, however. “Believe me, dear Baron, that the task I had to perform was not an easy one,” Steuben later explained to the Prussian ambassador in Paris. “My good republicans [that is, the Americans] wanted everything in the English style; our great and good allies [the French] everything according to the French
mode;
and when I presented a plate of
sauerkraut
dressed in the Prussian style, they all wanted to throw it out of the window. Nevertheless, by the force of proving by
Goddams
that my cookery was the best, I overcame the prejudices of the former; but the second liked me as little in the forests of America as they did on the plains of Rossbach.”)

For all the hardship, Washington and the army survived the winter at Valley Forge—partly because by the standards of old-timers in that country, the winter of 1777–78 was relatively mild. The arrival of spring brought additional good news: that France had embraced the American cause. The effect of the alliance was felt most immediately when the
British, under Howe’s replacement Henry Clinton, evacuated Philadelphia for New York, the better to fend off the expected French attack.

The first American cavalry unit entered Philadelphia fifteen minutes after the last British troops departed, and on a rising tide of American morale Washington’s forces harried Clinton’s across New Jersey. Washington was tempted to strike directly at the long, straggling British line, but after an engagement at Monmouth was mishandled (leading to the court-martial and conviction of Charles Lee), Washington was reduced to watching the British make their escape across the Hudson estuary to New York.

Had he delayed them just another week the war might have been materially shortened. On July 11 a French fleet of sixteen warships—which could have contested Clinton’s crossing of the Hudson—arrived off Sandy Hook. As it was, the fleet admiral, the Comte d’Estaing, was content to hover outside New York harbor, prevented from attacking the city by shallow water and the British guns that guarded the entrance. Meanwhile Washington crossed the Hudson upstream from the city and settled in at White Plains to keep Clinton from escaping by land.

With the
capital clear, the Congress returned to Philadelphia and voted to terminate the American commission in Paris. Three heads had been better than one in negotiating treaties, the legislators thought, but now that Louis’s government had recognized the United States, diplomatic precedent indicated representation by a single minister plenipotentiary. And where a certain skepticism, even suspicion, was called for in negotiators driving hard for a bargain, an expansive friendliness ought to guide the actions of an ambassador to a wartime ally. Franklin was the obvious choice, and the Congress made it.

Franklin delivered his letter of appointment to “Our Great Faithful & Beloved Friend and Ally,” as the Congress styled Louis, in February 1779. The letter requested his majesty to accept Franklin’s credentials and “to give entire credit to every thing which he shall deliver on our part.”

In fact Louis would have been wise to discount one of Franklin’s first messages. The Congress had instructed Franklin to ask the king for a French expeditionary force against Halifax and Quebec; Franklin unilaterally added British-occupied Rhode Island to the target list. In time Washington would accept the necessity of inviting French troops onto the soil of the United States, but for the moment the memories of
frontier service against the French were too strong. Though the American commander wanted French forces to harass Britain, he preferred they do it elsewhere than from American soil. Fortunately for Franklin, Louis was not ready to send soldiers across the Atlantic, and the request languished, sparing Franklin substantial embarrassment.

At seventy-three Franklin was an unlikely one to be swept away by zest for battle; the inspiration of his indiscretion may have been a young man nearly fifty-two years his junior. Lafayette was back in France after a brilliant beginning in America. Armed with Franklin’s letter of recommendation; with a desire to avenge his father, a colonel of grenadiers killed in the Seven years’ War; with a passion for
la gloire;
and, not least important, with a large independent income, he had convinced the Congress to make him a major general—at the tender age of nineteen. He immediately fell in love with Washington (“the God-like American hero” was how he described him to Franklin). Washington reciprocated by taking the boy general under his wing, almost as the son he never had. Lafayette was bloodied in his first battle, which endeared him to his men, and he shared their hardships at Valley Forge, which endeared him still more. A daring midwinter “irruption into Canada” by Lafayette and a handful of men foundered before launch, leaving Lafayette impatient for action. “Dear general,” he wrote Washington, “I know very well that you will do everything to procure me the only thing I am ambitious of—glory.” His ambition was satisfied slightly at the battle of Monmouth in June 1778, in which he performed with conspicuous bravery but incomplete success.

France’s entry into the war brought tears of joy and a request to return to his homeland to prepare the troops he was certain must be marching toward the docks already. The Congress consented; yet lest the courageous general forget his adopted country it voted to award him a special sword, which Franklin would present in France after it was fashioned. A minor problem arose on the return voyage when the crew—consisting largely of British prisoners and deserters—mutinied. But Lafayette unsheathed his regular sword and cowed the mutineers.

A problem of a different sort arose on arrival in Paris, when he was reminded that his service in America had violated a direct order of the king (given before the alliance with the United States). To his chagrin, the young marquis was placed under house arrest. His detention postponed a meeting he had requested with Franklin, to whom he carried a letter from Washington extolling his “zeal, military ardour and talents.”

Louis let Lafayette stew for a week before issuing a royal pardon. But
he insisted that Lafayette come to court to apologize in person. This provoked additional bit-champing. “In our kingly countries we have a foolish law called
Etiquette
that any one, though a sensible man, must absolutely follow,” Lafayette complained to Franklin. His enthusiastic reception at court momentarily alleviated his impatience. Even Marie Antoinette, who had laughed at his awkwardness on the dance floor and his inability to hold his liquor, joined the acclaim. The ladies of the court vied for his favors.

Yet he must return to soldiering. After Monmouth but before leaving for France, Lafayette had participated in a botched attempt to break the British hold on Newport, Rhode Island. Mortified by this failure, he ached to make it right. Lafayette was the courier who brought Franklin’s commission as minister plenipotentiary and his instructions from the Congress about asking France for help attacking Halifax and Quebec; he may have intimated that an attack on Rhode Island was an oral addendum to the written instructions—perhaps too sensitive to commit to paper. Franklin should have been shrewd enough to know the difference, but he may simply have been moved by the young hero’s obvious devotion to the American cause.

When the expedition to America was delayed, Lafayette proposed something more audacious: a strike at England itself. Louis’s tentative approval set him aquiver. “My blood is boiling in my veins,” he declared. In another letter, to Admiral d’Estaing, Lafayette warned, “If you undertake an attack on England and land troops and I am not there with you, I shall hang myself!”

Franklin would not have put his own feelings the same way, but he shared the broad sentiment, and he endorsed the expedition with enthusiasm. “I admire much the activity of your genius, and the strong desire you have of being continually employed against the common enemy,” Franklin wrote Lafayette. “It is certain that the coasts of England and Scotland are extremely open and defenceless. There are also many rich towns near the sea, which 4 or 5000 men, landing unexpectedly, might easily surprise and destroy, or exact from them a heavy contribution, taking a part in ready money and hostages for the rest.” Bristol, for example, ought to be worth 48 million livres, Liverpool the same, Bath 12 million, Lancaster 6 million. If the raiding parties included cavalry, all the better. “It would spread terror to much greater distances, and the whole would occasion movements and marches of troops that must put the enemy to prodigious expence and harass them exceedingly.”

Franklin did not presume to judge the military merits of one strategy
over another. But if history was any guide, the very audacity of the endeavor augured well for it. “In war, attempts thought to be impossible do often for that very reason become possible and practicable, because nobody expects them and no precautions are taken to guard against them.” Franklin concluded with an appeal he knew Lafayette could not resist: “Those are the kind of undertakings of which the success affords the most glory.”

In this
same letter Franklin noted that “much will depend on a prudent and brave sea commander who knows the coasts.” He had just the man in mind, although some wondered if “prudent” was the appropriate word. John Paul Jones had been born simply John Paul, the son of the gardener of a Scottish squire. Young John left home and went to sea at the age of twelve—about the same age Franklin thought of doing so from Boston. By nineteen he had visited Virginia, studied navigation, and advanced to first mate aboard a slaver making the notorious Middle Passage from Africa to America. Before long he had a command of his own, a Dumfries merchantman to the West Indies. Paul proved a taskmaster who brooked no dereliction; he flogged crewmen with gusto and some regularity. One day at Tobago he flogged the ship’s carpenter more severely than usual, and the man died. The carpenter’s father brought charges of murder against Paul, who was jailed. Eventually he persuaded others aboard the ship to affirm his innocence, and the charges were dropped, although a cloud of suspicion continued to hover about his head. In 1773, while commanding another ship, his crew challenged his authority, and in a scuffle the leader of the challenge was killed by Paul’s sword. Paul testified he was merely defending himself, but this time the witnesses were hostile, and he judged flight the better part of valor. A few weeks later he was in Virginia with a new surname: Jones.

During the next two years he discovered neither another ship nor work ashore. Yet the misfortunes of the British empire promised an end to his own, and when war broke out with Britain he sided with the Americans. He hurried to Philadelphia and received a commission as a lieutenant, upgraded to captain once the Congress acquired a few more ships. Commanding the
Providence
and then the
Ranger,
he won a reputation as the scourge of British shipping. In one especially daring raid he swooped down upon the Scottish coast with the aim of taking hostage the Earl of Selkirk, to be traded for American prisoners. But the earl
was out, and Jones’s crew satisfied themselves with stealing the family silver—which Jones subsequently purchased from them and returned to its owner.