The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (116 page)

Franklin greeted Morris’s appointment with pleasure. “From your intelligence, integrity, and abilities, there is reason to hope every advantage that the public can possibly receive from such an office,” he wrote Morris. Yet he warned Morris what he had got himself into—and in doing so transparently revealed an aspect of his own feelings about the nature of public service. “The business you have undertaken is of so complex a nature, and must engross so much of your time and attention as necessarily to injure your private interests; and the public is often niggardly, even of its thanks, while you are sure of being censured by malevolent critics and bug-writers, who will abuse you while you are serving them, and wound your character in nameless pamphlets, thereby resembling those little dirty stinking insects that attack us only in the dark, disturb our repose, molesting and wounding us while our sweat and blood are contributing to their subsistence.”

Morris
indeed suffered the sort of abuse Franklin forecast, even as his efforts allowed Washington’s army to fight another season. This by itself was a victory, and in keeping with Washington’s overall strategy. Despite his continuing worries about money and mutinies, Washington’s aim was straightforward: to keep fighting. The longer the rebellion lasted, the less British taxpayers liked it. So far the North ministry had managed to quell the stirrings of revolt in Parliament; how much longer it would be able to do so was an open question.

As Parliament grew impatient, so did Britain’s commanders in America. British victories in the south were singly satisfying but added up
to nothing. American irregulars prevented a consolidation of British control, leaving Clinton and Cornwallis to conclude that they had overrated the Crown’s popularity in that region. Cornwallis, commanding the south after Clinton’s return to New York, refused to spend the rest of his career in America. “I am quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventure,” he wrote. “If we mean an offensive war in America, we must abandon New York, and bring our whole force into Virginia. We then have a stake to fight for, and a successful battle may give us America.”

With Clinton’s approval, Cornwallis headed north, daring Washington to come out and fight. For several weeks Washington declined the dare. The British general swept into Virginia, driving Lafayette from Richmond; but still Washington held back. Cornwallis scattered Steuben’s forces; Washington did not move. Cornwallis dispersed the Virginia legislature at Charlottesville, missing the capture of Governor Jefferson at Monticello by a mere ten minutes. Washington remained aloof.

Washington’s patience paid off, albeit in an unexpected direction. In August he received word that the long-awaited French fleet under Admiral de Grasse was coming—but not to New York. The French commander had departed the West Indies with twenty-nine warships and 3,000 troops and was bound for the Chesapeake. At once Washington changed plans. He decided to leave Clinton to the comforts of Manhattan, and finally to accept Cornwallis’s challenge. For the whole war Washington had fought an enemy who could take to the waves when backed to the beach; the presence of Grasse would erase that disadvantage. “The moment is critical,” Washington reported to Congress, “the opportunity precious, the prospects most happily favourable.”

Immediately he wrote Lafayette, who became as excited as Washington. “Should a French fleet now come in Hampton Roads,” Lafayette predicted, “the British army would, I think, be ours.” Washington ordered Lafayette to get south of Cornwallis and prevent at all costs his slipping back into Carolina.

Washington then began preparing his own troops for a dash south. A master of logistics and preparation, he personally mapped the march and tended to every imaginable matter of provisioning and transport. Clinton’s spies saw signs of motion in Washington’s camp, but the American general spread disinformation indicating that he was simply circling south to assault New York from Staten Island. He sent crews to repair roads and bridges on the Jersey banks of the Hudson. He even constructed
a large oven to supply bread to the fictitious attackers. Not till too late did Clinton realize that the object of the preparations was not his army but Cornwallis’s.

By the time Washington passed through Philadelphia his destination was plain, but by then the cork was in the bottle. Grasse reached the mouth of the Chesapeake at the end of August, and although contrary winds and his own cautiousness prevented an attack on Cornwallis’s rear, the French presence precluded a British naval rescue of Cornwallis.

After the excitement of preparation and marching, the siege of Yorktown, where Cornwallis made his stand, went slowly. Washington wondered what his counterpart was thinking. “Lord Cornwallis’s conduct,” he remarked in the second week of October, “has hitherto been passive beyond conception. He either has not the means of defence, or he intends to reserve his strength until we approach very near him.”

The answer was a bit of both. By night Americans constructed emplacements within cannon shot of the British lines; by day the emplacements came under British fire—until they were completed and could return the fire, eventually silencing the British guns. The work was capriciously dangerous. A lieutenant colonel of the Virginia militia, St. George Tucker, recorded in his diary for October 6, “A man was killed by a cannon ball a day or two past without any visible wound. He was lying with his knapsack under his head which was knocked away by the ball, without touching his head.”

On the British side the situation was worse. Cornwallis went underground to escape the bombardment; others took their pounding at the surface. “An immense number of Negroes have died in the most miserable manner,” wrote Tucker, after interrogating a refugee from the siege. Desperate work with bayonets accompanied occasional assaults on British redoubts, but mostly the American and French artillery wore the defenders gradually down. American spirits rose accordingly. “Our shot and shell went over our heads in a continual blaze the whole night,” wrote an American soldier. “The sight was beautifully tremendous.” British spirits traced an inverse arc. “Our provisions are now nearly exhausted and our ammunition totally,” read the entry in one British officer’s journal for October 16.

Cornwallis was not the man to fight to the death, nor Virginia the place for him to do so. By October 17, when a hundred American and French guns maintained an unceasing barrage, he had had enough. The sheer noise made surrender difficult. Cornwallis put a drummer on the parapet to signal intent to parley, but no one on the American side could
hear him. “He might have beat away till doomsday,” remarked an American officer. But the white handkerchief attracted attention, and the guns fell silent. The next day the surrender was formalized.

It was exactly four years since the other great American victory of the war, at Saratoga. Heaven itself seemed to endorse the end of the fighting. St. George Tucker described the hours after the surrender:

A solemn stillness prevailed. The night was remarkably clear and the sky decorated with ten thousand stars. Numberless meteors gleaming through the atmosphere afforded a pleasing resemblance to the bombs which had exhibited a noble firework the night before, but happily divested of all their horror.

The next day the British troops marched out of the fortress. For nearly two miles American troops lined one side of the road, French troops the other. The British band played “Welcome, Brother Debtor” and other tunes, including “When the King Enjoys His Own Again.” With a different set of words, the latter was called “The World Turned Upside Down,” and it was by this title that Americans remembered it.

26
Blessed Work
1781–82

“My God! All is over,” moaned Lord North on hearing the news. Whether he meant the war or his ministry was not immediately clear; before long any distinction was moot. Even as King George prayed heaven “to guide me so to act that posterity may not lay the downfall of this once respectable empire at my door,” the opposition in Parliament was preparing to lay it at North’s. America was not the only issue causing complaints against the ministry, but it was the one the complainers could coalesce about. When a motion for abandonment of the American cause came within one vote of passage, North took this as his cue to resign after twelve years in office. Conventional wisdom was that “Lord North’s war” would follow him off the stage.

It did, but not without effort—much of it Franklin’s. The final phase of the conflict took him by surprise. “I wish most heartily with you that this cursed war was at an end,” Franklin wrote to one of the British friends with whom he still corresponded, just before news of Yorktown arrived. “But I despair of seeing it finished in my time. Your thirsty nation has not yet drank enough of our blood.”

It was with something less than despair, but hardly happiness, that Franklin learned he would have responsibility for bringing the war to an end. The Congress refused his request to retire, instead appointing him to a commission to negotiate a peace. He accepted the appointment from a sense of duty. “I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous,” he told John Adams, one of his fellow peace commissioners, “that was not censured as inadequate, and the makers condemned as injudicious or corrupt.
Blessed are the peace makers
is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently
cursed.
Being as yet rather too much attached to this world, I had therefore no ambition to be concerned in fabricating this peace.” All the same, he assured Adams, he deemed it an honor to serve with him in so important a business, and would work to the best of his ability.

The Congress named three peace commissioners besides Franklin and Adams. Thomas Jefferson never joined the group, remaining in America. Henry Laurens was an equally unhelpful choice, having been captured by the British on the Atlantic and currently residing in the Tower of London. John Jay was the fifth member; he, Franklin, and Adams did the bulk of the work.

For the first several months, however, Franklin was the only one of the three in Paris, where the serious talking took place. Adams was in Holland—which had entered the war against Britain, but refused alliance with the United States—trying to pry some guilders out of the Dutch burghers. (Holland’s profit-minded approach to diplomacy moved Franklin to remark, “Some writer, I forget who, says that Holland is no longer a
nation
but a
great shop;
and I begin to think it has no other principles or sentiments but those of a shopkeeper.”) John Jay was in Madrid having comparable bad luck with the Spanish, who likewise had declared war on Britain but likewise spurned the Americans. (Franklin urged Jay to hold firm against Spain’s efforts to take advantage of America’s distress, especially regarding the Mississippi. “Poor as we are,” he said, “yet as I know we shall be rich, I would rather agree with them to buy at a great price the whole of their right on the Mississippi than sell a drop of its waters. A neighbour might as well ask me to sell my street door.”)

The instructions from the Congress to the peace commissioners stipulated two nonnegotiable conditions: acknowledgment of America’s independence and the continuation of the treaty with France. The rest was left to the discretion of the commissioners. At the time the instructions were drafted—June 1781—Americans could hardly hope for more. But the victory at Yorktown improved America’s prospects, and Franklin intended to exercise his discretion to the utmost.

Yet even as Washington reinforced Franklin’s bargaining position, Arthur Lee sapped it. Lee had not wanted Franklin to have anything to do with peace talks, and contended that his appointment as commissioner came only “by the absolute order of France”—as communicated by the French minister in Philadelphia, the Chevalier de la Luzerne. “At this very time, Congress had the fullest evidence and conviction that Dr. Franklin was both a dishonest and incapable man,” Lee asserted. Several members of the Congress had registered concern at the terms of Franklin’s commission, with its instruction to cling to France. “He, good man,” Lee continued sarcastically, “felt no qualms at such a commission, no sense of dishonour or injury to his country. On the contrary, he expressed the utmost alacrity in accepting it, and I believe most cordially, since it puts him in the way of receiving money, which is the God of his idolatry.” As to what this meant for America, “The yoke is riveted upon us…. The French therefore are to make peace for us.”