22

Rebel

1775–76

 When Franklin left London at the vernal equinox of 1775 he believed he would never return. For most of eighteen years London had been his home; he knew London now better than he knew Philadelphia. But the London he left by coach to catch the Pennsylvania packet at Portsmouth was not the London he had known just a few years earlier. Corruption had always troubled its politics, yet corruption now overwhelmed all else. The placemen, the toadies, the cynics had triumphed; honest seekers after the welfare of the empire as a whole had no place. For eighteen years he had resisted returning to America, for the last eleven successfully; he resisted no more.

What he was returning to he could only guess. When he had left America in 1757 he was fifty-one, in the prime of his adult life. Now he was sixty-nine, an old man by anyone’s reckoning. Few of his contemporaries survived; for a decade or more his associates had been primarily of a younger generation.

The latest, and most poignant, reminder of mortality was the death of Deborah. After her stroke six years earlier she had never been the same. He could read in her letters that she was slipping from this earthly sphere. If it pained him he did not say—neither in letters nor in comments recorded by friends. Nor did he mention feeling guilty at having essentially abandoned her in her old age. “Her death was no more than might reasonably be expected after the paralytic stroke she received some time ago, which greatly affected her memory and understanding,” William wrote on Christmas Eve 1774, conveying the sad news. “She told me, when I took leave of her on my removal to Amboy [several months earlier] that she never expected to see you unless you returned this winter, for she was sure she should not live till next summer.” When Franklin read this, did it hurt more to know that Debbie felt this way, or that she had not told him? “I heartily wish you had happened to have come over in the fall, as I think her disappointment in that respect preyed a good deal on her spirits,” William concluded. Did Franklin need his son—who was not even herson—to tell him this?

If he felt any regrets about Deborah, he could comfort himself that she was now beyond whatever pain he might have caused her. William was another matter. The atrocious treatment Franklin received from the British government appeared not to have moved William at all. He had not protested; if anything, his relocation to Amboy, against his father’s advice, indicated a decision to make his future with Britain, whatever happened. The governor appeared a more dutiful servant to his king than son to his father. Did Franklin feel betrayed? Again, he did not say. But he had to sense that he and William were near a parting of the ways. Having just lost his wife, he was about to lose his son. Perhaps at this time, certainly at others, he must have reflected that however competent he might be at other aspects of human life, he fell short when it came to family.

Yet all was not lost in this regard. If he started to feel regretful during his westerly voyage that spring, he had only to look across the deck to where young Temple was conversing with the sailors or throwing a line over the side, for his spirits to revive. The lad was fifteen—bright, capable, curious. Franklin could not help seeing himself in the boy, or seeing William as he had been at that age, or seeing what Franky might have been. Then he would sigh, but the sigh would include a breath of hope.

 The line Temple was tossing over the side had one of his grandfather’s instruments attached to the end. Franklin spent much of the voyage recording the final failure of his efforts at imperial reconciliation, but between pages he made what he described to Joseph Priestley as “a valuable philosophical discovery” regarding the Gulf Stream, which remained almost as mysterious as on his first Atlantic crossing in 1724. He and Temple took regular measurements of the water through which their ship was sailing. The changes were striking as they entered the stream; the water was as much as nineteen Fahrenheit degrees warmer than water to the side. It also had a different color, Franklin thought, and did not sparkle at night the way water outside the stream did. And it carried what the sailors called “gulf weed.”

Though he learned much about the Gulf Stream, he did not yet understand its mechanism nor its actual consequences. The question that prompted his investigations in the first place was the venerable one of why ships sailing from America to England made better time than ships sailing the reverse route. At this point he speculated that it had to do with the excess angular momentum of bodies (including ships) farther from the earth’s axis of rotation. Simple geometry revealed that a ship at latitude 40 degrees traveled 120 miles per hour faster about the earth’s axis than a ship at 50 degrees. “This motion in a ship and cargo is of great force; and if she could be lifted up suddenly from the harbour in which she lay quiet, and set down instantly in the latitude of the port she was bound to, though in a calm, that force contained in her would make her run a great way at a prodigious rate. This force must be lost gradually in her voyage, by gradual impulse against the water, and probably thence shorten the voyage.”

This explanation was inadequate, as Franklin himself subsequently recognized. But it was no less ingenious for its inadequacy, and it demonstrated that whatever else his disillusionment with imperial politics accomplished, it did not dampen his interest in the world around him.

 Franklin’s arrival in America in early May was treated throughout the colonies as an event of great moment. A broadside posted on the streets of New York relayed a letter from Philadelphia:

Yesterday evening Dr. Franklin arrived here from London in six weeks, which he left the 20th of March, which has given great joy to this town. He says we have no favours to expect from the Ministry; nothing but submission will satisfy them. They expect little or no opposition will be made to their troops…. Dr. Franklin is highly pleased to find us arming and preparing for the worst events. He thinks nothing else can save us from the most abject slavery and destruction; at the same time encourages us to believe a spirited opposition will be the means of our salvation.

This was a fair summary of Franklin’s feeling, although it presupposed some critical knowledge Franklin did not possess until reaching American waters. On April 19 the war he had feared for many months began in earnest.

It did so for the reasons that were fully apparent in Franklin’s final weeks in England. The British government was determined to have matters out with the Americans. “The die is now cast,” George III declared. “The colonies must either submit or triumph.” Shortly thereafter the monarch made his point more forcefully: “The New England governments are in a state of rebellion. Blows must decide whether they are to be subject to this country or independent.”

On April 14 Governor Gage in Boston received orders from London to preempt the increasing strength of the Massachusetts militia. These “minutemen” and their slower comrades were training regularly, caching arms and ammunition, and growing more dangerous by the day. Though Dartmouth, the author of Gage’s latest instructions, was not advocating war per se, he was entirely prepared for it—and preferred that it come on the government’s terms and timing rather than those of the rebels. “It will surely be better that the conflict should be brought on, upon such ground, than in a riper state of rebellion.”

During the next four days Gage prepared a preemptive strike. Informers indicated that the militia had stockpiled weapons at Concord, twenty miles from Boston. Gathering his grenadiers and light infantrymen, he devised a plan for an operation to be launched in the dead of night with strictest secrecy. The strike force would embark by boat for Cambridge, whence they would march overland to Concord.

But the rebels had spies too. Paul Revere arranged a simple signal scheme: one lantern in the steeple of the North Church meant a march by land, over the neck of the peninsula and around Back Bay; two lanterns meant a shortcut across the water. Almost before the British troops mustered on the Common for their rowboat ride to Cambridge, Revere had two lanterns hung in the church tower and splashed off in a boat of his own to Charlestown, where he mounted and tore away toward Concord. He dodged a British patrol that had orders to intercept messengers—especially any riding breathlessly through the night. At Lexington he roused Sam Adams and John Hancock, who expected to be arrested whenever Gage’s soldiers could catch them. With other riders he resumed his journey to Concord. But he never reached that destination. Stopped by another British patrol, he was dehorsed and detained. (Later he was released to walk home.)

The alarm was abroad, however, and the minutemen mobilized. When the British reached Lexington at sunup, some seventy soldiers had arrayed themselves on the green at the side of the Concord road. The commander of the British force ordered the Americans to disarm and disperse. Counting red coats and concluding that in a skirmish they would be beaten, the Americans began to walk away—taking their guns with them. The British commander repeated his order for them to drop weapons; this time his tone was more insulting. Someone fired—an American, according to the British; a Briton, by the Americans. The shot triggered a volley by the British, then another, then a charge with bayonets. In five minutes the British had routed the Americans, who lost eight dead and ten wounded. One British soldier was nicked in the leg.

In high spirits the soldiers in the scarlet coats and the white breeches set off for Concord. By now all chance of surprise had evaporated; the drums beat the British march and the fifes pierced in the morning air. At Concord they encountered a larger group of militia—the Concord company plus several from the surrounding villages. For a few hours the two sides postured, marching and countermarching, not knowing whether this was war, peace, or something in between. The British began searching houses for guns, balls, and powder, finding little but provoking little resistance. Only when the courthouse and a smithy caught fire did the militiamen react strongly. “Will you let them burn the town?” demanded one of the American officers. To prevent it a group of the Americans began shooting at the British.

The British troops had no more experience than the Americans—the last war having ended a dozen years earlier, and these being young men. As it became clear the Americans were serious about resisting, the British fell back. They retreated down the road to Concord, with the Americans close behind. The rest of the day was a nightmare for the British; all the way to Boston they encountered snipers hiding behind the trees and rock walls at the side of the road, and were harassed at their rear by the advancing militiamen. Only after sunset did they reach the safety of the city. A tally of the losses showed some 270 killed or wounded. The American losses were a little over a third as many.

By the measure of men lost and mission unaccomplished, the British foray was a disaster. The Americans had reason to feel proud, and many did. But at the same time the reality of war was sobering. Jane Mecom wrote her brother with a personal account. In his last letter Franklin had told her to keep up her courage, as the current stormy weather could not last forever; she now replied:

I believe you did not then imagine the storm would have arisen so high as for the General [Gage] to have sent out a party to creep out in the night and slaughter our dear brethren for endeavouring to defend our own property. But God appeared for us and drove them back with much greater loss than they are willing to own. Their countenances as well as the confession of many of them shew they were much mistaken in the people they had to deal with, but the distress it has occasioned is past my description. The horror the town was in when the battle approached within hearing, expecting they would proceed quite in to town, the commotion the town was in after the battle ceased by the parties coming in, bringing in their wounded men, caused such an agitation of mind I believe none had much sleep. Since which we could have no quiet, as we understood our brethren without were determined to dispossess the town of the [British] regulars; and the General shutting up the town, not letting any pass out, but threw such great difficulties as were almost insupportable.

In other words, it was war, with all the terrors, trials, and uncertainties war entailed. For her part, Jane Mecom fled the city; she informed her brother she was taking refuge with his old friend Catherine Ray Greene and her husband, William, in Warwick, Rhode Island.

 Even as it drove Jane Mecom from her home, the fighting at Boston drew members of the Continental Congress back to Philadelphia. When last they met, the danger had been prospective; now it was actual. Then they had protested and petitioned; now they had to prosecute a war.

For this reason the man awaited most expectantly was not Franklin—whose appearance, in any event, took nearly all the delegates by surprise—but George Washington. The veteran soldier had attended the first Congress the previous year but been overshadowed by his Virginia colleagues Peyton Randolph, who was elected president, and Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, who stirred the delegates with their speeches. Washington seemed no more than “a tolerable speaker” to Silas Deane of Connecticut. He himself accounted his role in the Congress as that of “attentive observer and witness.”

The outbreak of fighting changed everything. Of speakers the new Congress had many; of military leaders it had but one. He packed his uniform when he left Mount Vernon for Philadelphia on May 4. Riding in his own chariot, he drew the cheers of Virginians and then Marylanders as he made his way north; six miles outside Philadelphia he was met by a boisterous brigade of five hundred horsemen. At the edge of the city several hundred more militia—mounted and foot—joined the cavalcade; a military band fell in step and played martial airs the rest of the way to the State House.

“We have a very full Congress,” Washington reported home, “and I flatter myself that great unanimity will prevail.” It did on one subject: the selection of a commanding general. “Colonel Washington appears at Congress in uniform,” John Adams wrote his wife Abigail, “and by his great experience and abilities in military matters is of much service to us.” (Adams added, with the envy and ambition that characterized his whole career, “Oh, that I were a soldier. I will be! I am reading military books.”) Briefly the delegates considered other individuals for the command. But Artemas Ward of Massachusetts, the most likely alternate, lacked Washington’s moral and military stature; Charles Lee (a professional soldier and resident Virginian who himself might have been a candidate but for his English birth) dismissed Ward as “a fat old gentleman who had been a popular churchwarden.” Consequently in mid-June the Congress voted without dissent to confer the command upon Washington. He becomingly professed himself unequal to the task. “However,” he continued, “as the Congress desire it, I will enter upon the momentous duty, exert every power I possess in their service, and for support of the glorious cause.”

 Franklin was one of those voting for Washington. Under other circumstances his fellow Pennsylvanians might have allowed him a well-deserved retirement upon his return. Franklin himself was looking forward to such when he left London. But the onset of war altered this as so much else. When the Pennsylvania Packet landed at the foot of Market Street on May 5, the delegates to the Continental Congress were already converging on Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Assembly did not grant Franklin even twenty-four hours before electing him a delegate to the Congress. Who knew better than Franklin the mind of the ministry in London? Who better to advise the Congress on what to expect from Parliament?

Matters did not work out quite as expected. Franklin was weary from the voyage and needed time to readjust to a city he hardly knew. America had grown as rapidly as he had predicted it would; Philadelphia led the growth. The city was filled with new buildings and new faces. As he rode from the river the two blocks up Market Street—to the house Debbie had lived in these last ten years but that was new to him—he must have marveled at what a different place it was from the city that had first greeted him half a century before. At times he had felt old in London; here in Philadelphia he felt absolutely ancient.

And all the more ancient when the Congress convened at the State House. The building was the same one where he had so often sat while in the Assembly, but the generation of men filling the chairs was decidedly different. Franklin was easily the oldest man present, a full twenty or thirty years older than the moving spirits of the body. George Washington was forty-three; his fellow Virginians Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson were thirty-eight and thirty-two respectively. John Adams was thirty-nine; John Hancock, also of Massachusetts, thirty-eight.

The young men of the Congress exhibited the impatience of youth. “A frenzy of revenge seems to have seized all ranks of people,” Jefferson observed as the delegates gathered in Philadelphia; and if the frenzy diminished slightly as the magnitude of the task before the Congress became apparent, audacity remained the predominant attitude.

Franklin disappointed some of those who knew him only by reputation—a group that encompassed nearly the entire membership. He struck no lightning bolts of rhetoric, preferring to sit silent while others orated. Washington cut a far more impressive figure in his soldier’s uniform than Franklin in his philosopher’s coat. The visitors from out of town—again, nearly the entire body—took dinner together in taverns and spent nights about town; Franklin retired to his own house when the Congress recessed, passing evenings with Sally and Richard Bache and his grandchildren. (“The youngest boy is the strongest and stoutest child of his age that I have ever seen,” he boasted to Jane Mecom, regarding two-year-old William Bache. “He seems an infant Hercules.”)

Franklin’s diffidence struck some as suspicious. William Bradford, the son of Franklin’s old printing rival, currently publisher of the Pennsylvania Journal, and like many another journalist an avid consumer of gossip, complained to James Madison (not a delegate to the Congress but at twenty-four already active in Virginia politics), “I have but little to tell you of the Congress; they keep their proceedings so secret that scarce any thing transpires but what they think proper to publish in the papers.” Yet all was not lost to one who kept his ear to the keyhole. “I can however (inter nos) inform you that they begin to entertain a great suspicion that Dr. Franklin came rather as a spy than as a friend, & that he means to discover our weak side and make his peace with the minister by discovering it to him.” Bradford could not vouch for the veracity of the report, which might sound implausible on its face. “But the times are so remarkable for strange events,” he reasoned, “that improbability is almost become an argument for their truth.”

The source of the rumors was Richard Henry Lee, the Virginia delegate who was also the elder brother of Arthur Lee. Obviously Arthur had been sharing his own suspicions (and jealousies) of Franklin; probably he had told Richard Henry to keep watch on the crafty old man. Perhaps the elder Lee had been poisoning other Virginia minds against Franklin; James Madison for one was entirely willing to credit Bradford’s gossip. “If he were the man he formerly was, and has even of late pretended to be,” Madison said of Franklin, “his conduct in Philadelphia on this critical occasion could have left no room for surmise or distrust. He certainly would have been both a faithful informer and an active member of the Congress. His behaviour would have been explicit and his zeal warm and conspicuous.” (Madison possessed a brilliant legal mind but also a penchant for assuming the worst of others. Before maligning Franklin he had castigated Washington as one of a class of tidewater gentry that demonstrated “a pusillanimity little comporting with their professions or the name of Virginian.”)

Franklin doubtless heard the rumors. As on other occasions he let silence supply his answer, and as on most other occasions it sufficed. “Hath any thing further been whispered relative to the conduct of Dr. Franklin?” queried the conspiratorially minded Madison after a dearth of additional dirt. Bradford could only disappoint. “The suspicions against Dr. Franklin have died away,” Bradford reported. “Whatever was his design at coming over here, I believe he has now chosen his side, and favours our cause.”

John Adams put the matter more positively. Franklin’s initial diffidence had reflected respect for the Congress and a desire to avoid claiming special wisdom for himself, Adams said. Of late Franklin had displayed “a disposition entirely American.” Indeed, far from favoring Britain, he was Britain’s bitterest foe. “He does not hesitate at our boldest measures, but rather seems to think us too irresolute and backward.”

 What silenced the skeptics was their gradual realization that on the subject of resistance to British tyranny, none was more determined than Franklin. He took no pleasure in the present war—“which the youngest of us may not see the end of,” he said. “But, as Britain has begun to use force, it seems absolutely necessary that we should be prepared to repel force by force, which I think, united, we are well able to do.”

Franklin was still angry over his own and America’s treatment by the British government, and his anger grew with accumulating evidence of British perfidy. Late June brought news of the Battle of Bunker Hill, in which British troops torched parts of Charlestown, outside of Boston. “She has begun to burn our seaport towns,” he wrote Joseph Priestley, “secure, I suppose, that we shall never be able to return the outrage in kind.” To Jonathan Shipley he complained of London’s diplomacy. “All Europe is conjured not to sell us arms or ammunition, that we may be found defenceless, and more easily murdered.” Eminent British figures, Franklin said, were advocating attempts “to excite the domestic slaves you have sold us to cut their masters’ throats.” Others urged “hiring the Indian savages to assassinate our planters in the back-settlements.” “This is making war like nations who never had been friends, and never wish to be such while the world stands.”

No one in Britain was closer to Franklin than Bishop Shipley; it pained Franklin to write as he did, but he felt he had reason—reason shared by his countrymen. “You see I am warm; and if a temper naturally cool and phlegmatic can, in old age, which often cools the warmest, be thus heated, you will judge by that of the general temper here, which is now little short of madness.”

The clearest evidence of Franklin’s anger—rage is hardly too strong a word—was a letter he wrote to William Strahan. The letter, to Franklin’s oldest friend in England, was jarringly direct.

Mr. Strahan,

You are a member of Parliament, and one of that majority which has doomed my country to destruction. You have begun to burn our towns, and murder our people. Look upon your hands! They are stained with the blood of your relations! You and I were long friends; you are now my enemy, and I am yours.

Franklin never sent this letter; his anger, though powerful, did not carry him away. Yet the fact of its writing indicated the emotional separation he felt from England—and it suggested, with everything else, that political separation could not be far behind. “Words and arguments are now of no use,” he said in a letter he did send to Strahan. “All tends to a separation.” To Joseph Priestley he explained the circumstances surrounding what came to be called the “Olive Branch petition.” “It has been with difficulty that we have carried another humble petition to the Crown, to give Britain one more chance, one opportunity more of recovering the friendship of the colonies, which however I think she has not sense enough to embrace.” Anticipating the rejection that indeed occurred, he closed, “And so I conclude she has lost them forever.”

 A full year before the Congress declared officially in favor of independence, Franklin had come to believe that independence was inevitable. Now he began working to make it a reality. None but the most obtuse could conceive American independence absent some form of intercolonial union; in July 1775 Franklin proposed a plan for just such a union. In spirit these “Articles of Confederation” drew on the plan of union he had presented at Albany in 1754, but what then would have been a federation within the British empire now foreshadowed an independent state. The purpose of the confederation was the colonies’ “common defence against their enemies” and “the security of their liberties and properties, the safety of their persons and families, and their mutual and general welfare.” The congress of the confederation would be empowered to declare war and negotiate peace, enter into alliances, settle disputes among the separate colonies, create new colonies, arrange treaties with the Indian tribes, establish a post office, and administer or otherwise regulate a general currency. Representation in the congress would be proportional to population; executive power would be vested in an “executive council” whose members would serve staggered three-year terms. The congress would have the power to propose amendments to the articles of confederation; these would take effect on adoption by a majority of the colonies.

Franklin appreciated that all this was considerably more than many of the delegates to the Continental Congress were willing to accept. To allay their fears he appended a clause contemplating the dissolution of the confederation upon Britain’s restoration of the rights and privileges of the American colonies, the withdrawal of all British troops from America, and the receipt of compensation for damages to Boston’s commerce and Charlestown’s structures and for the expense to the colonies of “this unjust war.” How much this actually allayed the fears of the timid must be doubted; by all proclamation and policy Britain evinced that it would never accept such conditions. Failing acceptance, “this Confederation is to be perpetual.”

Even with the escape clause Franklin’s confederation was too forward, as he certainly realized. He contented himself with reading his articles to a committee of the whole Congress. He made no motion that required a vote or even a formal record of his proposal; his purpose was to set the delegates thinking about the kind of union that would be necessary to fight and win a war and to carry America into the peace beyond. In this he certainly succeeded, and when the time proved riper, his proposal became the starting point for the Articles of Confederation the Congress and the states finally adopted.

Other actions by Franklin bore fruit immediately. It was lost on none of the delegates, on none of the committees of correspondence of the several colonies, or for that matter on the British government, that the resistance to British usurpation could not have congealed as it had without an efficient postal service. Needless to say, British postal officials would be loath to deliver letters for practicing rebels; already the mails were being regularly opened. And already the colonial governments were making separate provisions for delivery. As one, the delegates to the Congress concluded that the obvious person to organize this alternative service was the man who had made the system run so well under the British. On July 26 the Congress unanimously elected Franklin postmaster general for the American colonies.

Even as he engaged the subordinates necessary to make the American post office a reality (true to nepotic form, he appointed Richard Bache his secretary and comptroller), Franklin received another appointment freighted with no less importance, albeit considerably less publicity. In September he was named to the “secret committee” of the Congress; this group bore primary responsibility for obtaining the weapons necessary to wage the war. Franklin’s experience provisioning General Braddock’s army at the outset of the French and Indian War stood him well in this endeavor, as did his repeated raising of militia to defend Philadelphia, and his construction of forts on the Pennsylvania frontier. But the job was immense, being hardly less than creating an army from scratch—or, what was worse, from a motley collection of militias jealous of their rights and confirmed in their ignorance.

 Franklin felt the immensity of the task on a visit to General Washington’s headquarters. Following his appointment to the command of what was optimistically styled the “Continental Army,” Washington traveled to Boston to take charge of the mostly Massachusetts force besieging the British there. He required a few weeks to assess his soldiers and reconnoiter the position; molding the militia into a real army took considerably longer. This necessitated the creation of an officer corps that knew its business and could teach the troops. But the troops did not want to learn, considering themselves above discipline and, in many cases, intending to leave the ranks when their brief terms of enlistment expired. To make bad worse, winter was fast descending on an army ill equipped even for a New England autumn. Washington appealed to the Congress for help; without it, he warned, the army would disintegrate.

The Congress did what congresses do: it appointed a committee to investigate. Franklin headed the committee; joining him were Thomas Lynch of South Carolina and Benjamin Harrison of Virginia. In October the three traveled to Washington’s headquarters at Cambridge. For seven days they met with Washington and his staff in an effort to forge a policy that would meet the needs of the military moment without abridging the political liberties for which the war was being fought. Discipline was a central issue. The group authorized the death penalty for mutiny and incitement thereto. Drunken officers should be drummed out of the army with infamy. Sentries caught asleep should receive not less than twenty lashes nor more than thirty-nine. An officer absent without leave should be fined one month’s pay for the first offense and cashiered for the second; an enlisted man should be confined and placed on bread and water for seven days for the first such offense and suffer similar confinement, with loss of a week’s pay, for the second.

The group considered rations—to wit, what the Congress could afford and the men tolerate. They decided on a pound of beef or salt fish or three-quarters of a pound of pork per man per day; a pound of bread or flour; a pint of milk; a quart of spruce beer or cider (or 9 gallons of molasses per company—of somewhat fewer than a hundred men—per week, for making rum); a half-pint of rice or one pint of cornmeal per man per week; 24 pounds of soft soap or 8 pounds of hard soap per company per week; and 3 pounds of candles per company per week. Additional provisions—vegetables, beans and peas, extra milk—might be purchased by the troops at regulated prices.

Standards were established for the men’s arms. The several colonies should set their gunsmiths to work fabricating firelocks with barrels three-quarters of an inch in bore and 44 inches in length, with bayonets 18 inches in the blade. For additional arms the colonies should “import all that can be procured.”

The size of the army should be increased to 20,000 (the overly precise figure was 20,372). It should consist of regiments of 728 men (including officers), with each regiment divided into eight companies consisting of one captain, two lieutenants, one ensign, four sergeants, four corporals, two drums or fifes, and 76 privates. Some in the Congress, complaining of cost, advocated reducing the pay of the troops. Washington and his staff, and Franklin and his committee, agreed unanimously that lowering pay “would be attended with dangerous consequences.” It should remain at 40 shillings per month.

Provisions for privateers were made, along with procedures for disposing of their prizes. General Washington should arrange for the sale of vessels and cargoes captured by warships outfitted at the expense of the Congress; the proceeds would support the war effort.

Many other matters were decided, but on a critical question of strategy the soldiers and civilians agreed to consult the Congress. Washington and his war council had determined that a frontal attack on the British forces in Boston was impractical before winter; he now requested guidance as to whether an artillery bombardment of British positions and troops in the city was appropriate. He could probably compel a withdrawal, but not without destroying the town. What should he do?

Franklin and the other committee members agreed, as they stated in their report, that this was “a matter of too much consequence to be determined by them”; therefore they referred it back to the Congress. In sending them off, Washington made another appeal for money: “The General then requested that the Committee would represent to the Congress the necessity of having money constantly and regularly sent.”

Franklin had heard the dire reports from Washington and others of the army’s troubles; having seen the soldiers and spoken to the officers, he thought the reports overblown. “Here is a fine healthy army,” he wrote Richard Bache, “wanting nothing but some improvement in its officers, which is daily making.”

As for the expense of the war, he was similarly optimistic. What was necessary could well be borne.

Though I am for the most prudent parsimony of the public treasury, I am not terrified by the expence of this war, should it continue ever so long. A little more frugality, or a little more industry in individuals will with ease defray it. Suppose it [costs] £100,000 a month, or £1,200,000 a year. If 500,000 families will each spend a shilling a week less, or earn a shilling a week more; or if they will spend 6 pence a week less and earn 6 pence a week more, they may pay the whole sum without otherwise feeling it. Forbearing to drink tea saves three fourths of the money; and 500,000 women doing each threepence worth of spinning or knitting in a week will pay the rest. (How much more then may be done by the superior frugality and industry of the men?)

I wish nevertheless most earnestly for peace, this war being a truly unnatural and mischievous one; but we have nothing to expect from submission but slavery and contempt.

In another letter Franklin examined the cost question from the British side and came to the same conclusion. He and Joseph Priestley had a mutual friend, Richard Price, a man of mathematical (among other) interests; Franklin sent Priestley a message to forward. “Tell our good friend Dr. Price, who sometimes has doubts and despondencies about our firmness, that America is determined and unanimous, a very few tories and placemen excepted, who will probably soon export themselves.” Franklin then suggested a simple calculation. “Britain, at the expence of three millions, has killed 150 Yankees this campaign, which is £20,000 a head; and at Bunker’s Hill she gained a mile of ground, half of which she lost again by our taking post on Ploughed Hill. During the same time 60,000 children have been born in America. From these data his mathematical head will easily calculate the time and expence necessary to kill us all, and conquer our whole territory.”

 While Washington maintained the siege of Boston (permission to bombard the city was withheld), another American force drove north to Canada. As it had for the French before them, Canada currently enabled the British to conceive a strike at the American interior, raising the possibility that New England might be cut off, via New York and the Hudson River, from the lower colonies. The American invasion of Canada was designed to deny that province to the British; if the Canadians could be persuaded to join the other colonies in opposition to Britain, all the better.

The invasion was a two-pronged affair. Philip Schuyler pushed up from Fort Ticonderoga along Lake Champlain to Fort St. John; after sickness disabled him he turned the command over to Richard Montgomery, who captured Montreal before driving down the St. Lawrence toward Quebec. Meanwhile Benedict Arnold led an appallingly arduous march across Maine, losing nearly half his men to cold, hunger, sickness, exhaustion, and discouragement before meeting up with Montgomery below the walls of Quebec. At dawn on the last day of 1775 the combined American force attempted to repeat Wolfe’s feat of seizing the fortress. The assault was a fiasco, with Montgomery (like Wolfe in this respect at least) dying in the battle. A seriously wounded Arnold watched the American force break itself on the British defenses; in a howling blizzard the Americans—those who avoided death or capture—had all they could do to retreat beyond range of the defenders’ guns. Snug behind their walls, the British let them freeze while both sides awaited the spring thaw, which would certainly bring British reinforcements up the river, and possibly American reinforcements overland.

Naturally the Continental Congress desired to know whether to send such reinforcements, especially in light of the other demands on American resources. In March 1776 the Congress appointed a commission to travel to Canada to investigate. The commissioners were Franklin, Samuel Chase of Maryland, and Charles Carroll, another Marylander, who was not a delegate to the Congress but who had been educated in France and was a prominent Catholic. Carroll was also the cousin of John Carroll, an even more prominent Catholic and a priest, who was persuaded to accompany the commission; the two Carrolls, the Congress thought, might have some influence with the largely Catholic, formerly French, Canadians.

The British government learned of the mission almost as soon as it began. None other than William Franklin informed Lord Germain, the new secretary for America and the man overseeing the American war, of his father’s movements, company, and purpose. “I have just heard,” the governor wrote on March 28, “that two of the delegates (Dr. Franklin and Mr. Chase) have passed through Woodbridge this morning in their way to Canada, accompanied by a Mr. Carroll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of great estate in Maryland, and a Romish priest or two. It is suggested that their principal business is to prevail on the Canadians to enter into the confederacy with the other colonies and to send delegates to the Continental Congress.” William added a pleasant note: “It is likewise reported that a great number of the continental troops have returned to Albany, not being able to cross the lakes, several soldiers, carriages, etc. having fallen in and some lives lost by the breaking of the ice.”

Franklin encountered the problems of the ice, as well as others felt acutely by a man of seventy. His trip up the Hudson—Lake George—Lake Champlain corridor was all he could manage. “I begin to apprehend that I have undertaken a fatigue that at my time of life may prove too much for me,” he wrote Josiah Quincy while waiting at Saratoga for the ice to clear. “So I sit down to write to a few friends by way of farewell.”

Yet Franklin’s time had not come, and in fact he held up better in certain instances than his traveling companions. At St. Johns they spent two nights sleeping on the floor of a house that had been wrecked by fighting; while Charles Carroll complained of his aching back, Franklin amused the party with stories from his long personal history.

At Montreal they met with General Arnold, still hobbling and now directing the siege of Quebec from a distance. Arnold’s was a personality that blew hot and cold; after a long winter the cold won out regarding Canada. From Arnold and others the commission learned of the discouraging prospects for American forces along the St. Lawrence. Part of the problem was military, reflecting the difficulties of supporting an invasion so far from home. But the larger part was political. American forces were living off the land—which was to say off the labor of the locals. Sometimes the American officers simply took what they needed; sometimes they promised to pay. The latter instances blurred into the former when the officers, lacking money from the south, failed to fulfill their promises. On May 1 Franklin and the others urged the Congress to apply the “utmost dispatch” in supplying Arnold with money—£20,000 would make a fair start. “Otherwise it will be impossible to continue the war in this country, or to expect the continuance of our interest with the people here, who begin to consider the Congress as bankrupt and their cause as desperate.” In its charge to the commission the Congress had instructed the commissioners to propose a union of Canada with the other colonies; Franklin thought such an offer unwise under present circumstances. “Till the arrival of money, it seems improper to propose the federal union of this province with the others, as the few friends we have here will scarce venture to exert themselves in promoting it till they see our credit recovered and a sufficient army arrived to secure the possession of the country.”

A week of additional discussions underscored this argument. Apparently the creditors of the American forces had been led to believe that the commissioners were bringing money; they were sorely disappointed to learn otherwise. The American Congress had become contemptible in Canadian eyes; with British ships even now on the way to lift the siege of Quebec, attachment to the Americans would have been nothing less than folly. “We have daily intimations of plots hatching and insurrections intended for expelling us on the first news of the arrival of a British army,” Franklin wrote for himself and the others. “Your commissioners themselves are in a critical and most irksome situation, pestered hourly with demands great and small that they cannot answer, in a place where our cause has a majority of enemies, the garrison weak, and a greater would, without money, increase our difficulties.” A single conclusion was possible: “If money cannot be had to support your army here with honour, so as to be respected instead of hated by the people, we repeat it as our firm and unanimous opinion that it is better immediately to withdraw it.”

Unbeknownst to Franklin, American forces were already putting his advice into effect. At the beginning of May the freshly arrived American commander at Quebec, John Thomas, decided to drop the ragged siege there. Slowness in carrying out the decision, however, enabled the long-awaited British reinforcements to turn an orderly retreat into an ignominious rout. Thomas succumbed to smallpox, his successor mounted an unsuccessful counterattack, and by mid-July the Americans had been driven all the way back to Ticonderoga.

 Amid the bad news from the north came good news—or at least big news—from Philadelphia. For some months opinion in the colonies, and in the Congress, had been inching toward the conclusion Franklin had reached the previous summer: that independence was inevitable. To some extent this reasoning reflected the iron logic of battle; the longer Americans fought against the British, the less likely they were to desire reconciliation with the British. But even the inevitable requires explanation, often justification, of which none was more compelling than that provided by Thomas Paine.

Franklin knew Paine. Indeed Franklin was largely responsible for Paine’s presence in Philadelphia. One of Franklin’s fellows in the Royal Society had introduced young Paine to Franklin in London, and although Paine’s career to date consisted chiefly of failure—at corsetmaking, schoolteaching, shopkeeping, tax-collecting—he was a self-taught seeker of practical knowledge in a variety of fields, with an obvious irreverence toward British authority. In other words, he was a young man of the sort Franklin might wish to encourage. This Franklin did. When Paine in 1774 indicated a desire to emigrate to America, Franklin supplied a letter of introduction to Richard Bache. Franklin described Paine to his son-in-law as “an ingenious, worthy young man,” and requested a favor: “If you can put him in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school, or assistant surveyor (all of which I think him very capable), so that he may procure a subsistence at least, till he can make acquaintance and obtain a knowledge of the country, you will do well and much oblige your affectionate father.”

Franklin’s letter was almost literally a lifesaver. On the voyage over, Paine took fearfully sick; he remained at death’s portal when the ship docked in Philadelphia. “Dr. Kearsley of this place attended the ship upon her arrival,” Paine wrote Franklin from America, “and when he understood that I was on your recommendation he provided a lodging for me and sent two of his men with a chaise to bring me on shore, for I could not at that time turn in my bed without help.” Slowly Paine recovered, and as he did so he benefited still more from Franklin’s good offices. “Your countenancing me has obtained me many friends and much reputation.” Several gentlemen requested that he tutor their sons; a printer, Robert Aitken, enlisted his help producing a new magazine.

This latter connection had momentous implications for Paine and for America. Aitken’s journal afforded the budding journalist scope to sharpen his now-discovered gift for political argumentation; in the course of the next year the Pennsylvania Magazine ran articles by Paine against slavery and in favor of various vital causes.

None was so vital as that of American independence, which in late 1775 inspired Paine to write perhaps the most inspired political pamphlet in American history. Common Sense appeared in January 1776; at two shillings for forty-seven pages it soon sold more than a hundred thousand copies. “I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine declared in asserting that continued connection with Britain made no more sense than perpetual childhood for a grown adult, that no continent should be forever governed by an island, that attachment to Britain would inevitably draw America into Europe’s wars, and, finally, that “a government of our own is our natural right.”

Common Sense produced a “great impression” among the delegates to the Continental Congress, Franklin said. In doing so it tilted the field of debate decidedly toward independence. One by one those advocating additional efforts toward reconciliation changed their minds; one by one the provincial assemblies instructed their delegates to consider formal separation. On June 7 Richard Henry Lee offered a motion declaring “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” The motion encountered some residual resistance, which prompted a decision to delay a final vote until the first of July. Meanwhile the Congress created a committee to draft a declaration justifying the decision for independence, should the Congress so decide. Appointed to the committee were John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York, and Franklin.

Franklin had little to do with the first drafting of the document, which the committee left to Jefferson, partly because of his known felicity of phrasing (“You can write ten times better than I,” John Adams recalled telling Jefferson), partly because Jefferson was a Virginian (and hence would add geographic balance to a conflict provoked by New England), partly because none on the committee appreciated what a momentous document this would be, and partly because Franklin was happy to leave the task to another. He would explain this last point to Jefferson presently; for now his physical condition afforded sufficient excuse. “I am just recovering from a severe fit of the gout, which has kept me from Congress and company almost ever since you left us,” Franklin wrote on June 21 to Washington, who had departed Philadelphia on June 4 after a series of meetings with delegates. Besides gout and fatigue, Franklin suffered from an assortment of rashes, boils, and related lesions that reflected both the strain of the Canada trip and the inability of travelers to keep as clean as at home. Franklin had tried to avoid two other chronic problems of travelers—bedbugs and lice—by carrying his own bedding; whether he succeeded is unclear. But June was, altogether, a miserable month for him.

So Jefferson retired to the second-story parlor of the house of a young German mason named Graff, and on his lap-desk drafted the declaration. When he had something he liked he sent it the short distance to Franklin’s house. “Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?” he requested in a covering note.

After decades as a writer and editor, Franklin knew good prose when he read it. He treated Jefferson’s draft gently. Jefferson’s phrase “reduce them to arbitrary power,” referring to what the British were trying to do to the Americans, was strengthened to “reduce them under absolute despotism.” “Amount of their salaries”—referring to what King George was trying to seize as a lever against colonial judges—was made more specific: “the amount and payment of their salaries.” “Taking away our charters, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments” was elaborated: “taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments.” “Answered by repeated injury” was sharpened: “answered only by repeated injury.” “To invade and deluge us in blood” was toned down: “to invade and destroy us.”

The Congress handled Jefferson’s draft more harshly. Clause after sentence was struck, leaving Jefferson aghast. Franklin consoled him with what became one of his most famous stories. “I was sitting by Dr. Franklin, who perceived that I was not insensible to these mutilations,” Jefferson recalled.

“I have made it a rule,” said he, “whenever in my power, to avoid becoming the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body. I took my lesson from an incident which I will relate to you. When I was a journeyman printer, one of my companions, an apprentice hatter, having served out his time, was about to open shop for himself. His first concern was to have a handsome signboard, with a proper inscription. He composed it in these words, ‘John Thompson, Hatter, makes and sells hats for ready money,’ with a figure of a hat subjoined. But he thought he would submit it to his friends for their amendments. The first he showed it to thought the word ‘Hatter’ tautologous, because followed by the words ‘makes hats,’ which showed he was a hatter. It was struck out. The next observed that the word ‘makes’ might as well be omitted, because his customers would not care who made the hats. If good and to their mind, they would buy them, by whomsoever made. He struck it out. A third said he thought the words ‘for ready money’ were useless, as it was not the custom of the place to sell on credit. Every one who purchased expected to pay. They were parted with, and the inscription now stood, ‘John Thompson sells hats.’ ‘Sells hats!’ says his next friend. ‘Why, nobody will expect you to give them away. What then is the use of that word?’ It was stricken out, and ‘hats’ followed it, the rather as there was one painted on the board. So the inscription was reduced ultimately to ‘John Thompson,’ with the figure of a hat subjoined.”

Another—briefer—statement attributed to Franklin may not actually have passed his lips (it was not recorded until many years later), but it certainly expressed his feeling. John Hancock, as president of the Congress, advocated that the body make the vote on the Declaration unanimous. “There must be no pulling different ways,” Hancock said. “We must all hang together.” To which Franklin reportedly rejoined, “Yes, we must indeed all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

 Franklin had hardly put his signature to the Declaration of Independence before he went to work on a new constitution for Pennsylvania. Doubtless he was struck by the fact that the goal of his first mission to England—the end of proprietary rule in Pennsylvania—was finally achieved only by ending English rule in all the American colonies. In 1757 he had seen King George as the protector of the people against the Penns; in 1776 the people had to protect themselves, and against George even more than against the Penns.

Shortly after his return from London, Franklin had been elected by the Assembly to be president of its Committee of Public Safety. For a few months he tended assiduously to the committee’s affairs, but his mission to Massachusetts and his other work for the Continental Congress cut into the time he could devote to the Pennsylvania committee, and in February 1776 he resigned.

This did not prevent his supporters in Philadelphia from electing him to a convention called in the summer of 1776 to write a new constitution for the state of Pennsylvania. The Declaration had dissolved the connections between the colonies and Britain and presumably nullified their colonial charters; the new states now set to work, with various degrees of dispatch, writing new charters. Pennsylvania’s convention met on July 15, and on the following day it unanimously selected Franklin as its president.

For the next two months he alternated between the Congress and the convention—which conveniently met in the same building, the State House. As president of the convention he presided rather than participated directly; the heavy drafting he left to others. He did express strong support for perhaps the most distinctive feature of the constitution that emerged: the unicameral legislature. A legislature with two houses was like a wagon with two teams, he said. Where some conservatives took this idea as reassurance—that each team would check the other and prevent the people from running off with the government—Franklin saw equal likelihood that they would negate each other’s effort and thereby prevent the people from enacting needed measures, in much the way the Penns had prevented the Assembly from acting on the people’s behalf. In supporting a single house, Franklin manifested his faith in the people to govern themselves.

 This same faith informed his principal contribution to a renewed debate in the Congress over articles of confederation for the United States as a whole. A central sticking point involved representation, specifically whether representatives would be apportioned by states, on the one hand, or by population (or wealth, its rough equivalent), on the other. Franklin urged the latter, on grounds of both equity and practicality. He was not quite a democrat, in the sense of thinking every person had a right to an equal voice in government. But he predicted that a confederation that countenanced gross disproportions in shared burdens between citizens of different states would not last. “Let the smaller colonies give equal money and men,” he said, “and then have an equal vote. But if they have an equal vote without bearing equal burdens, a confederation upon such iniquitous principles will never last long.”

Franklin lost this argument—and lived long enough to see his prediction prove true, when the confederation based on the one-state, one-vote principle came undone. On a related question he looked similarly to the future. If representation were not to be by states but by population or wealth, how should slaves be measured? By numbers, as people, or value, as property? The issue became moot at this time with the choice of representation by states, but in the discussion the question arose whether a state with many slaves was stronger than a state with few slaves, in the way that a state with many sheep or cattle was stronger than a state with few such livestock. Supporters of slavery, likening slaves to sheep, explicitly or implicitly judged slaves a net addition to states’ strength.

Franklin disagreed tersely. “Slaves rather weaken than strengthen the state,” he said, “and there is therefore some difference between them and sheep. Sheep will never make insurrections.”

 Franklin had to break off constitution-making to tend to the hostilities at hand. Eighteen months earlier, when Lord Howe had consulted with Franklin on a plan for reconciliation, the British government had displayed no interest; now, after a year of fighting, Howe—an admiral as well as a lord, and currently the commander-in-chief for America—was on his way from London with an offer of peace. Franklin had been his American contact then; Franklin became his American contact again. Two weeks after Congress approved the Declaration of Independence, Franklin received a letter from his erstwhile interlocutor. “My Worthy Friend,” began the letter, which proceeded to express Howe’s earnest wish for “the reestablishment of lasting peace and union with the colonies.” As means to this end, Howe informed Franklin and the Congress, he and his fellow peace commissioner—his brother, General William Howe—were authorized to offer amnesty to all Americans who renewed their allegiance to the Crown, to suspend hostilities against those colonies evincing a desire for peace, and to reward those persons who assisted in the restoration of order.

Franklin turned Howe’s letter over to John Hancock and asked the Congress president that it be read to the body. After this was done, the Congress authorized Franklin to respond. He did so in a manner that left no doubt whatsoever that Howe had come a long way to no purpose. Nor did Howe have any difficulty discerning the anger that still burned in Franklin. “Directing pardons to be offered the colonies, who are the very parties injured,” Franklin wrote, “expresses indeed that opinion of our ignorance, baseness and insensibility which your uninformed and proud nation has long been pleased to entertain of us; but it can have no other effect than that of increasing our resentment.” The Declaration’s litany of British crimes had not yet reached the king; Franklin supplied a short summary. “It is impossible we should think of submission to a government that has with the most wanton barbarity and cruelty burnt our defenceless towns in the midst of winter, excited the savages to massacre our farmers, and our slaves to murder their masters, and is even now bringing foreign mercenaries to deluge our settlements with blood.” If Americans could never forgive such injuries, neither could they realistically expect the British to forgive the assertion of American rights. “And this must impel you, were we again under your government, to endeavour breaking our spirit by the severest tyranny, and obstructing by every means in your power our growing strength and prosperity.” Franklin could describe what Britain needed to do to restore peace, but he would be wasting his time. “I know too well her abounding pride and deficient wisdom to believe she will ever take such salutary measures. Her fondness for conquest as a warlike nation, her lust of dominion as an ambitious one, and her thirst for a gainful monopoly as a commercial one (none of them legitimate causes of war), will all join to hide from her eyes every view of her true interests.”

Franklin considered Howe a personal friend, and in this letter he got personal.

Long did I endeavour with unfeigned and unwearied zeal to preserve from breaking that fine and noble China vase, the British empire. For I knew that being once broken, the separate parts could not retain even their share of the strength or value that existed in the whole, and that a perfect re-union of those parts could scarce even be hoped for. Your Lordship may possibly remember the tears of joy that wet my cheek when, at your good sister’s in London, you once gave me expectations that a reconciliation might soon take place. I had the misfortune to find those expectations disappointed, and to be treated as the cause of the mischief I was labouring to prevent.

Franklin averred his respect for Howe as a gentleman, but even gentlemen had to take responsibility for their actions. The present war against America was unwise and unjust.

And I am persuaded cool, dispassionate posterity will condemn to infamy those who advised it, and that even success will not save from some degree of dishonour those who voluntarily engaged to conduct it. I know your great motive in coming hither was the hope of being instrumental in a reconciliation; and I believe when you find that impossible on any terms given you to propose, you will relinquish so odious a command and return to a more honourable private station.

Howe apparently was shocked by the vehemence of Franklin’s letter. “I watched his countenance, and observed him often to express marks of surprise,” recorded the emissary who delivered the letter. “When he had finished reading it, he said his old friend had expressed himself very warmly.” The emissary—an officer from Washington’s headquarters, through which Franklin’s reply reached Howe—inquired whether there was a response. “He declined, saying the doctor had grown too warm, and if he expressed his sentiments fully to him, he should only give him pain, which he wished to avoid.”

Eventually Howe did reply, first by letter to Franklin directly, then by a lately captured American officer, John Sullivan. Since the winter of 1775–76 the main theater of the war had shifted from New England to New York. In March the British evacuated Boston; General Howe pulled all his troops (and some thousand Loyalists) back to Halifax. Three months later he redeployed to the mouth of the Hudson River, landing at Staten Island on the same day the draft of the Declaration of Independence was laid before the Congress. Shortly thereafter Admiral Howe arrived with a large fleet and many more troops.

Washington had anticipated the redirection of British forces and marched his army south. But he was outnumbered and, after General Howe moved 20,000 troops east to Long Island, outflanked. In sharp fighting the British inflicted a major defeat on the Americans; only a skillful nighttime crossing of the East River to Manhattan averted the wholesale destruction of the American army.

Admiral Howe judged the aftermath of the battle of Long Island propitious for a parley. He paroled General Sullivan, the senior American prisoner, to Philadelphia to apprise the Congress of his sincere desire to terminate the conflict before it went further. Under the circumstances of the Long Island defeat, the Congress could not but listen; at the same time it resisted appearing in the role of supplicant. After some debate it appointed a committee, consisting of Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, to visit the admiral and hear him out. If nothing else, Howe’s acceptance of the credentials of the committee would confer a legitimacy upon the Congress the British government had heretofore refused to give.

Accordingly, Franklin set out from Philadelphia again. The roads and inns were crowded with soldiers and other travelers; this part of the country was not yet at war but obviously expected to be. John Adams, recuperating from an illness, recorded the first night.

At Brunswick, but one bed could be procured for Dr. Franklin and me, in a chamber little larger than the bed, without a chimney and with only one small window. The window was open, and I who was an invalid and afraid of the air in the night, shut it close.

“Oh!” says Franklin. “Don’t shut the window. We shall be suffocated.”

I answered I was afraid of the evening air.

Dr. Franklin replied, “The air within this chamber will soon be, and indeed is now, worse than that without doors. Come! Open the window and come to bed, and I will convince you. I believe you are not acquainted with my theory of colds.”

Opening the window and leaping into bed, I said I had read his letters to Dr. Cooper in which he had advanced that nobody ever got a cold by going into a cold church, or any other cold air. But the theory was so little consistent with my experience that I thought it a paradox. However I had so much curiosity to hear his reasons that I would run the risque of a cold.

The Doctor then began an harangue, upon air and cold and respiration and perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep, and left him and his philosophy together. But I believe they were equally sound and insensible, within a few minutes after me, for the last words I heard were pronounced as if he was more than half asleep.

The next day they arrived at Amboy, opposite Staten Island. Howe sent over a barge with an officer who had instructions to remain there, as a hostage for the return of the commissioners. Franklin and the others declined the offer, taking the officer back with them and thereby placing themselves as hostages to Howe’s honor.

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.’”