23
Before the meeting with the American commissioners adjourned, Howe remarked, “I suppose you will endeavour to give us employment in Europe.”
This was precisely what Franklin was endeavoring to do. From the start of the war Franklin and other American leaders had recognized that their success might well hinge on the attitude of other European countries, especially France, toward the conflict. Four times in the last eighty years France had fought against Britain; a fifth time might free America from London’s grasp.
In November 1775 the Congress appointed Franklin to a Committee of Secret Correspondence. His fellow committeemen were John Dickinson, Benjamin Harrison, John Jay, and Thomas Johnson; their job was to seek foreign support for the war. “It would be agreeable to Congress to know the disposition of the foreign powers towards us,” Franklin wrote on behalf of the committee to Arthur Lee in London. “We need not add that great circumspection and impenetrable secrecy are necessary.” The same day Franklin wrote in his own voice to the son of the Spanish King Charles. The infante, a noted classicist, had sent Franklin a copy of his translation of Sallust; Franklin took the opportunity to thank the prince for the gift. He apologized that he had nothing comparable to return. “Perhaps, however,” he went on, “the proceedings of our American Congress, just published, may be a subject of some curiosity at your court. I therefore take the liberty of sending your Highness a copy, with some other papers which contain accounts of the success wherewith Providence has lately favoured us. Therein your wise politicians may contemplate the first efforts of a rising state, which seems likely soon to act a part of some importance on the stage of human affairs, and furnish materials for a future Sallust.”
This was a bold statement seven months before the Declaration of Independence, but hardly bolder than Franklin’s concurrent actions. During the same week Franklin and the Committee of Secret Correspondence met covertly—by night, in the Philadelphia Carpenters’ Hall rather than the State House—with one Monsieur Bonvouloir, young aristocrat sent from the French court to spy out the American situation. Franklin and the others asked whether France was well disposed toward the colonies and whether she might sell them needed arms and ammunition. Bonvouloir, without avowing any formal connection to the French government, suggested that indeed his country wished the Americans well, and that weapons might be made available.
Concurrently Franklin, as a member of the Secret Committee (he could have been forgiven for confusing his secret committees), conducted negotiations with two French merchants who were not agents of King Louis but intimated they were. This pair hoped to profit from the Americans’ predicament by selling them the matériel they needed. The Secret Committee supplied them a list of the Continental Army’s requirements and sent them on their way, hoping for the best.
Not long thereafter the Committee of Secret Correspondence decided to act more forthrightly. Franklin approached Silas Deane, a former colleague on the Secret Committee who had lost his place there when the Connecticut assembly, for reasons best known to itself, refused to return him to Congress after the end of 1775. Since then he had donned the frock coat of the merchant, which seemed to Franklin appropriate apparel for an American agent. “On your arrival in France, you will for some time be engaged in the business of providing goods for the Indian trade,” Franklin explained, after Deane agreed to serve the Congress in a new capacity. “This will give good countenance to your appearing in the character of a merchant, which we wish you continually to retain among the French in general, it being probable that the court of France may not like it should be known publicly that any agent from the Colonies is in that country.” In addition Deane would carry letters from Franklin to some of Franklin’s French friends; this would appear perfectly legitimate even as it allowed the envoy to contact influential people in Paris. “You will find in M. Dubourg [Franklin’s French editor] a man prudent, faithful, secret, intelligent in affairs, and capable of giving you very sage advice.”
But Dubourg would chiefly be a conduit to the key personage in French foreign affairs, the foreign minister Comte de Vergennes. At the earliest possible moment Deane should apply for an audience with Vergennes—“acquainting him that you are in France upon business of the American Congress, in the character of a merchant, having something to communicate to him that may be mutually beneficial to France and the North American colonies.” Most pressing was the need of the colonies for arms and ammunition. Deane should point out to Vergennes that France was the first country to which the colonies were making application and “that if we should, as there is a great appearance we shall, come to a total separation from Britain, France would be looked upon as the power whose friendship it would be fittest for us to obtain and cultivate.” Britain had benefited handsomely from the commerce of the American colonies; France might inherit that benefit in the likely event of American independence.
Franklin specified what the colonies required: “clothing and arms for twenty-five thousand men, with a suitable quantity of ammunition, and one hundred field pieces.” Ideally the French government would provide the colonies sufficient credit to purchase these items, with repayment to come from Franco-American trade. Less ideal, but acceptable, would be for the French government to allow Deane to arrange private financing. Once purchased, the items “would make a cargo which it might be well to secure by a convoy of two or three ships of war.”
This was asking much, as Franklin knew. But there was more. Should Vergennes appear sympathetic, Deane ought to inquire “whether, if the Colonies should be forced to form themselves into an independent state, France would probably acknowledge them as such, receive their ambassadors, enter into any treaty or alliance with them?”
The premise in this question was the sticker. France was willing to grant the Americans a modest amount of money simply for the nuisance they caused Britain; in May 1776 Louis approved an appropriation of 1 million livres. But this amount, while numerically impressive, would not keep the Continental Army in boots and bullets long. France refused to plunge deeper until the Americans proved their willingness and ability to see their task to its end.
The willingness came with the Declaration of Independence, which was a document written for foreign readers as much as for Americans. The ability was more problematic. The collapse of the Americans’ Canadian offensive, followed by Washington’s defeat on Long Island, left the French and other Europeans with grave doubts the Americans would last another season of fighting.
The Americans were caught in a cruel trap. They could not win without French backing, but they could not gain French backing without showing they could win. The Congress, desperate, directed Franklin to Paris.
His purpose was the same as that of Deane (who would join him, and Arthur Lee, on a three-man diplomatic commission): to obtain arms and an alliance. The former would be paid for with promises, the latter extorted with threats. Just two weeks earlier Franklin had informed Lord Howe that reunion with Britain was beyond consideration. Now he was authorized to threaten just such a reunion, to spur France to prevent it. “It will be proper for you,” read his instructions, “to press for the immediate and explicit declaration of France in our favour, upon a suggestion that a reunion with Great Britain may be the consequence of a delay.”
For a man of seventy, suffering from gout and assorted lesser afflictions, to leave his home in the middle of a war, to cross a wintry sea patrolled by enemy warships whose commanders could be counted on to know him even if they knew nary another American face, was no small undertaking. John Adams declined nomination to Franklin’s commission; Thomas Jefferson rebuffed election. Yet Franklin had made his decision that America must be free, and he was determined to pay whatever cost his country required. “I have only a few years to live,” he told Benjamin Rush, “and I am resolved to devote them to the work that my fellow citizens deem proper for me; or speaking as old-clothes dealers do of a remnant of goods, ‘You shall have me for what you please.’”
Crossing the Atlantic with the old man were his two grandsons, Temple Franklin and Benny Bache. Temple’s presence reflected a family tragedy, the final estrangement between Franklin and William. Since his arrival back from London in May 1775, Franklin had seen his son but a handful of times. The first meeting, the one that set the tone for the others, occurred at Joseph Galloway’s estate in Bucks County, outside Philadelphia. Long Franklin’s ally against the Pennsylvania proprietors, Galloway had drifted away on the quarrel with Britain—or perhaps Franklin had drifted from Galloway. Galloway tried to span the gap between the colonies and England by proposing a plan of imperial union; though initially heard with respect, the plan was later shouted down in the rising clamor for independence, and the author was targeted for death threats. One grim morning he woke to find a noose on his doorstep. William Franklin of course was persona non grata anywhere near the Congress; as the prime representative of the Crown in New Jersey, he was feeling increasingly isolated even in his own province.
Distance had divided Franklin and William for ten years; now politics did so. William was loath to raise political issues, hoping to preserve the personal relationship even if their former political partnership was beyond rescue. But Galloway felt no filial compunctions, and as the Madeira was passed around, tongues and tempers loosened in all corners of this triangle. William and Galloway described the intolerance of the colonial radicals, their abuse of moderates like themselves, their insistence on having their way even at the cost of violence to their fellow provincials and of the destruction of the empire. Franklin had not experienced the excesses his son and his former ally described, having been out of the country since before the trouble began; he knew them only by hearsay, and then often from the pens and mouths of informers he distrusted, such as Thomas Hutchinson. For Franklin the corruption and self-interest that counted was the corruption and self-interest of London, which he doubtless described in some detail to Galloway and William this night. None of the three recorded their conversation, but it would have been odd if Franklin had not got around to his session in the Cockpit with Wedderburn and the lords of the Privy Council.
Perhaps Franklin had hoped to persuade his son in person, as he had not been able to persuade him by letters, to abandon the Crown in favor of the people. The conversation at Galloway’s disabused him of any such idea. When he had last seen his son, William was thirty-four, hardly more than a boy in his father’s eyes, and new in his post as governor. Now William was middle-aged and the longest-serving royal governor in North America. Away from his father he had grown into a man of his own, as convinced of the correctness of his principles as his father was of hisprinciples, and as stubborn in defending them. The apple had fallen close to the tree in regard of character, if not of politics.
Franklin and William met once more, in November 1775. Franklin was returning from Massachusetts and his meeting with General Washington; accompanying him was Jane Mecom, a refugee from the British forces occupying her hometown. As they passed through Perth Amboy they visited William’s three-story mansion, which his aunt accounted “very magnificent.” But Franklin was uncomfortable there; such elegance, complete with gilt-framed portraits of King George and Queen Charlotte in the great parlor on the first floor, seemed to exemplify what the colonists were fighting against. Besides, he was the bearer of critical intelligence regarding the Continental Army; he must have guessed that William would feel compelled to pass along, in the letters he wrote regularly to London, any information his father let drop.
It was just such letters that sealed William’s fate. In January 1776 the Continental Congress ordered the disarming of all potential threats to the patriot cause. William Alexander, the leader of the local militia and a former friend but now bitter enemy of William Franklin’s, interpreted the order as authorizing the interception of the mail of royal officials, including the governor. Alexander snatched a parcel labeled “Secret and Confidential” and addressed to Lord Dartmouth, and forwarded it to the Congress in Philadelphia. For good measure he placed the governor under house arrest.
After some months’ deliberation—during which William managed to smuggle out additional letters, including the one to Lord Germain about his father’s mission to Canada—the case came to trial. By now the Congress was on the verge of declaring independence, and the separate colonies were forming new governments of their own. The provincial assembly of New Jersey declared William Franklin a “virulent enemy to this country, and a person that may prove dangerous.” It requested the Congress to remove him from New Jersey. The Congress, having examined the governor’s letters and determined that they contained intelligence damaging to the American cause, approved the request. In late June 1776 it ordered William sent to Connecticut, there to be placed under the authority of Governor Jonathan Trumbull.
Franklin lifted no finger on behalf of his son. He did send sixty dollars to William’s wife, Elizabeth, who was utterly distraught by this turn of events. Betsy had feared for her husband’s life at the time of his arrest, and still worried about his health. Her own health was poor, with asthma a chronic affliction. None of her own family were anywhere near. She could not join her husband in his Connecticut exile lest his enemies—or plain criminals—loot the house in Perth Amboy.
“I will not distress you by enumerating all my afflictions,” she wrote Franklin in August 1776, “but allow me, Dear Sir, to mention that it is greatly in your power to relieve them. Suppose that Mr. Franklin would sign a parole not dishonourable to himself, and satisfactory to Governor Trumbull; why may he not be permitted to return into this province and to his family? … Consider, my Dear and Honoured Sir, that I am now pleading the cause of your son, and my Beloved Husband. If I have said or done anything wrong I beg to be forgiven.”
Franklin may have been inclined to forgive Betsy, but he would not forgive William. Steeling his heart, he left him to his fate.
Worse, he stole William’s son. Temple had carried the sixty dollars to his stepmother (who at some point had been apprised, as Temple himself had been, that Temple was William’s son, rather than godson), and seeing her plight, decided to stay. Not long thereafter he proposed visiting his father in Connecticut and wrote Franklin for approval. The ostensible reason for the visit was to deliver a letter from his stepmother to his father; almost certainly he wished to see and talk to his father, whom he hardly knew.
“I have considered the matter, and cannot approve of your taking such a journey at this time, especially alone, for many reasons which I have not had time to write,” Franklin replied. Two which he did write were that Mrs. Franklin could perfectly well get a letter to Temple’s father in care of Governor Trumbull, and that Temple needed to return to Philadelphia to resume his studies at the college there. “This is the time of life in which you are to lay the foundations of your future improvement, and of your importance among men. If this season is neglected, it will be like cutting off the spring from the year.”
Temple chose not to defy his grandfather for his father and stepmother, and he returned to Philadelphia—just in time to leave with Franklin for France. Whether Franklin explained how this comported with his professed desire that Temple continue his studies is unclear; if he did, he probably denominated it an education in public affairs. Temple would be his amanuensis and companion. The lad would go where Franklin went and meet whom Franklin met. He would also encounter the risks—from angry waves and angry men-of-war—his grandfather encountered. It would indeed be an education in public affairs, and doubtless an exciting one.
Benny Bache also accompanied his grandfather. Sally and Richard’s boy would not stay with Franklin and Temple in Paris but would be sent to school somewhere creditable and convenient—and safer than the rebel capital in wartime. At seven Benny could understand only part of what was happening around him, but he too must have considered it the most exciting time of his young life.
The passage from America to France was “short but rough,” in Franklin’s contemporary account. His ship, the Reprisal, had been hastily pressed into the service of the fledgling United States navy, and though it was fast enough to capture two British merchantmen en route, it was hardly suited to the comfort of passengers. It pitched violently for nearly the whole of the thirty-day run, allowing Franklin hardly a night’s—or day’s—decent rest. The food was poor; he had to rely on salt beef because the chickens served were too tough for his teeth. His boils and rashes returned. In short, he told his daughter and son-in-law later, the voyage “almost demolished me.”
To avoid the English Channel and the British vessels therein, the Reprisal made for the south coast of the Breton peninsula. Easterly winds hindered an ascent of the Loire to Nantes; rather than spend another night aboard the bucking vessel, Franklin packed himself, Temple, and Benny into a fishing boat that deposited them at Auray. A carriage was sent for—the village had none—to carry them to Nantes.
At Nantes, Franklin was recognized, but his purposes he kept to himself. “I have acquainted no one here with this commission, continuing incognito as to my public character,” he wrote Silas Deane. He needed to sound out the French government before lowering his mask. Yet his silence simply fueled speculation. The learned doctor was traveling with his two grandsons; were they defecting from the American cause? Money appeared to be no object in his accommodations or conveyance; had he absconded with the American treasury?
In that impoverished neighborhood not even the carte blanche of the Congress could eliminate the discomforts and hazards of travel. “The carriage was a miserable one,” Franklin wrote of one stretch of the journey, “with tired horses, the evening dark, scarce a traveller but ourselves on the road; and to make it more comfortable, the driver stopped near a wood we were to pass through, to tell us that a gang of eighteen robbers infested that wood, who but two weeks ago had robbed and murdered some travelers on that very spot.”
Yet there were compensations. Tired and uncomfortable as he was, Franklin observed the countryside and its denizens with care. “On the road yesterday we met six or seven country-women, in company, on horseback and astride; they were all of fair white and red complexions, but one among them was the fairest woman I ever beheld.”
Franklin’s arrival in Paris was a personal triumph. “The celebrated Franklin arrived at Paris the 21st of December and has fixed the eyes of every one upon his slightest proceeding,” recorded one French diarist. Another stated, “Doctor Franklin, arrived a little since from the English colonies, is mightily run after, much feted by the savants. He has a most pleasing expression, very little hair, and a fur cap which he keeps constantly on his head.” This observer was pleased to note additionally: “Our esprits forts have adroitly sounded him as regards his religion, and they believe that they have discovered that he is a believer in their own—that is to say, that he has none at all.” Some claimed Franklin as a Frenchman; the name “Franquelin,” they pointed out, was common in Picardy. Others were content that he was part of the classical—if not mythological—heritage of Western civilization. “He was not given the title Monsieur; he was addressed simply as Doctor Franklin, as one would have addressed Plato or Socrates,” said one who so addressed him. “If it is true that Prometheus was only a man, may one not believe that he was a natural philosopher like Franklin?” Poems were written to honor the American sage, the great philosopher of liberty. “It is the mode today,” observed a Franklin-watcher in the French capital just three weeks after his arrival, “for everybody to have an engraving of M. Franklin over the mantelpiece.”
Well they might have. Franklin offered something to almost everyone in France. He was a philosopher to the liberal philosophes, an ardent foe of Britain (by now it was clear he was not selling America out) to the conservatives who hungered for revenge against perfidious Albion, a wit to the habitués of the salons, a prophet of profits to the makers of weapons and outfitters of privateers.
He was also a bit of a puzzle to King Louis’s foreign minister. Vergennes had a grand design for French policy, namely the restoration of French grandeur, so badly tarnished in the last war. Upon appointment in 1774 he had begun a buildup of French armed strength, of which the centerpiece would be a navy the fighting equal to Britain’s. On current, necessarily secret, estimates, the buildup would reach fruition sometime in 1778.
The outbreak of the American war presented an opportunity and a problem. The opportunity was the obvious one: to capitalize on Britain’s current discomfiture and distraction. The problem was less obvious (to those unaware of the foreign minister’s timetable) but no less real: whether to accelerate war plans in order to exploit England’s troubles, or to stick with the plan. How much help would the Americans be in a war? How real was the prospect of their reconciliation with Britain, or their defeat? Vergennes needed to know.
He did not get much out of Franklin—but then neither did Franklin get much out of him. Upon Franklin’s arrival in Paris, where he was joined by Deane and Lee, the three applied for an interview with Vergennes. The foreign minister declined a formal meeting at Versailles in favor of a secret session in Paris, intended to take the measure of the Americans, Franklin especially, rather than to determine policy. “Intelligent, but very circumspect,” was how the foreign minister characterized Franklin, adding, “This did not surprise me.”
Franklin spoke for the group, and for the American Congress. He indicated his country’s interest in a treaty with France (and, for good measure, with Spain). When Vergennes nodded noncommittally, Franklin promised a memorandum on the current state of American affairs. The foreign minister indicated he would read such a memorandum with great interest.
Franklin spent the last days of 1776 drafting the memo, which he delivered to Vergennes at Versailles early in January. Franklin’s message mixed promises with threats.
As other princes of Europe are lending or hiring their troops to Britain against America, it is apprehended that France may, if she thinks fit, afford our Independent States the same kind of aid, without giving England just cause of complaint. But if England should on that account declare war, we conceive that by the united force of France, Spain and America, she will lose all her possessions in the West Indies, much the greatest part of that commerce that has rendered her so opulent, and be reduced to that state of weakness and humiliation she has by her perfidy, her insolence, and her cruelty both in the East and West so justly merited.
On the other hand, without French assistance, especially at sea, America might be forced to terminate the war.
While the English are masters of the American seas and can, without fear of interruption, transport with such ease their army from one part of our extensive coast to another, and we can only meet them by land marches, we may possibly, unless some powerful aid is given us, or some strong diversion made in our favour, be so harassed and put to such immense expense as that finally our people will find themselves reduced to the necessity of ending the war by an accommodation.
France and Spain must seize the moment to link arms with America. Franklin summarized and concluded:
North America now offers to France and Spain her amity and commerce. She is also ready to guarantee in the firmest manner to those nations all their present possessions in the West Indies, as well as those they shall acquire from the enemy in a war that may be consequential of such assistance as she requests. The interest of the three nations is the same. The opportunity of cementing them, and of securing all the advantages of that commerce, which in time will be immense, now presents itself. If neglected, it may never again return. We cannot help suggesting that a considerable delay may be attended with fatal consequences.
Vergennes was not to be moved by mere rhetoric. During the next few months he kept Franklin and the other Americans at arm’s length. Their requests for interviews were diverted to his assistants, their very existence hardly acknowledged by the French court. Their request for a treaty was rebuffed, as was their application for such formal and undeniable assistance as a loan of ships of the French line. Clearly the government was not ready to embrace the American cause openly—for fear “of giving umbrage to England,” Franklin explained to the Committee of Secret Correspondence.
Yet privately Vergennes facilitated the American war effort. The ports of France were opened to American vessels for the selling of American goods and the buying of French. Arrangements were made for the purchase of five thousand hogsheads of American tobacco by the Farmers General, a consortium of bankers and merchants closely connected to the government, which besides collecting taxes for the king ran the state’s tobacco monopoly. The Farmers General would advance 1 million livres in payment; further sums would follow commencement of delivery of the tobacco. The government itself provided a grant of 2 million livres, to be paid in four quarterly installments.
On the whole Franklin found cause for optimism, as he usually did. The delay in winning an alliance with France simply meant France would be stronger when the alliance did come, as Franklin was certain it ultimately would—by either a positive act on France’s part or a British declaration of war against France for assisting the Americans. And the French would bring Spain—“with which they mean to act in perfect unanimity,” Franklin remarked. “Their fleet is nearly ready,” he said of the French, “and will be much superior to the English, when joined with that of Spain, which is preparing with all diligence. The tone of the Court accordingly rises; and it is said that a few days since, when the British ambassador intimated to the minister, that if the Americans were permitted to continue drawing supplies of arms &c. from this kingdom, the peace could not last much longer, he was firmly answered, Nous ne desirons pas la guerre, et nous ne le craignons pas. We neither desire war, nor fear it.” Franklin was not willing to predict a date for the onset of hostilities; this might be a matter of chance. But it could not be far off. “When all are ready for it, a small matter may suddenly bring it on; and it is the universal opinion that the peace cannot continue another year. Every nation in Europe wishes to see Britain humbled, having all in their turns been offended by her insolence.”
America’s star was on the rise. “All Europe is for us. Our Articles of Confederation, being by our means translated and published here, have given an appearance of consistence and firmness to the American states and Government, that begins to make them considerable. The separate constitutions of the several states are also translating and publishing here, which afford abundance of speculation to the politicians of Europe.”
On this point Franklin was speaking more of popular opinion than of the views of the courts of the Continent—which on principle looked askance at republicanism. His meaning became clear as he described what victory would yield. “It is a very general opinion that if we succeed in establishing our liberties, we shall as soon as peace is restored receive an immense addition of numbers and wealth from Europe, by the families who will come over to participate our privileges and bring their estates with them.” This made the American cause all the more worthy.
Tyranny is so generally established in the rest of the world that the prospect of an asylum in America for those who love liberty gives general joy, and our cause is esteemed the cause of all mankind. Slaves naturally become base as well as wretched. We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature. Glorious it is for the Americans to be called by Providence to this post of honour. Cursed and detested will everyone be that deserts or betrays it.
The great goal of Franklin’s French mission was an alliance with Louis’s regime, but achieving that goal required keeping the United States afloat till the Bourbon monarch came round. Money was a constant problem, despite the grants and advances Vergennes arranged. Franklin knew something about financing a war from the last conflict with France, but the war against Britain ate through money faster than he or anyone else in America had imagined. For internal consumption the Congress could levy taxes and print money, both of which it did. Yet neither addressed the need for foreign exchange—the coin of the realms where Americans hoped to buy the muskets, cannons, ships, and other items they could not produce themselves in the quantities they needed. For these they had to pay in promises, which went at a severe discount after disasters like Long Island, or in trade goods the French, Spanish, and other foreigners wanted to buy. The tobacco deal marked a start, but it soon suffered from the same ailment that afflicted the rest of the trade from America: British men-of-war, which stopped up American ports and scoured the shipping lanes to Europe. Vessels got through now and again, compensating their captains for their audacity, but not frequently enough to keep the new republic in the livres it required.
An alternative was resort to privateers, the licensed pirates on whom the English had relied since the days of Francis Drake. The privateers preyed on the maritime trade of Britain, thereby depriving London of revenues; more positively (from the American perspective), the privateers’ prizes might be sold on the open foreign market for the hard currency America desperately required.
The problem was that the market for prizes was not as open as Franklin and the other Americans wished. France was the obvious place to sell the captured cargoes and vessels, and France was where they were first disposed of. Lambert Wickes, the captain of the Reprisal, the bucking brig that brought Franklin over from Philadelphia, sold his two prizes to French purchasers willing to wink at the falsified papers that were to the privateers’ practice what Continental dollars were to the fiscal practice of the American Congress. But the British were not so tolerant. They warned Vergennes that conspiracy in piracy might lead to belligerency. Vergennes initially told Franklin that American privateers in French ports must leave with their prizes at once, but upon being informed that the vessels in question required repairs, and that to turn them out would simply turn them over to the British, the foreign minister relented. They might stay—indeed they must stay—pending further notice.
Although Franklin was willing to abide by Vergennes’s cease-and-desist order, the privateers themselves—for whom privateering was often as much a moneymaking venture as an exercise in patriotism—were not. Gustavus Conyngham was released from French custody at Dunkirk on the assurances of the American commissioners that he and his cutter Revenge would sail directly to America and engage in no activities hostile to Britain save self-defense. The captain blithely ignored written orders and set about picking off British merchantmen. To make matters worse, he allowed one of his prizes to be recaptured by the British, and the prize crew (the sailors from Conyngham’s ship detailed to sail the captured vessel in place of the now-confined original crew) turned out to be mostly Frenchmen.
The fault was not all Conyngham’s. Evidently the captain had received an oral message from one William Carmichael, a courier from Franklin and the commission, that countermanded his written orders. Carmichael evidently considered Franklin too timid and desired to force the French into the war. Whether or not Conyngham suspected Carmichael of freelancing, the captain was happy to resume his predation.
Vergennes had no interest in which Americans were to blame; the fact that French sailors had been captured in what the British interpreted as piracy provoked a diplomatic crisis. A special envoy from King George arrived at Versailles threatening war against France. Vergennes and Louis took the matter most seriously, with the former warning the French ambassador in London that hostilities could begin at any time and the latter holding French ships in port. Louis also ordered American privateers and prizes out of French harbors, repaired or not. Vergennes refused to deal further with Franklin or the other American commissioners.
Franklin understood that Vergennes’s displeasure was as much for Britain’s benefit as America’s, and he assumed that once the war scare passed, the displeasure would dissipate.
Other problems were less tractable. The American commissioners had charge of purchasing weapons and other war matériel for Washington’s army, and though funding these purchases was a constant challenge, there was no lack of interest on the part of French and other European merchants and manufacturers in America’s business. Yet precisely because of the uncertainty of getting paid, those expressing the interest were often of the enterprising—not to say shady—sort.
One of the more curious characters Franklin encountered was Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a Frenchman with background and interests almost as varied as Franklin’s. The son of a watchmaker, Beaumarchais had developed a modest reputation as an inventor; his creativity found other outlets in music and drama. His popular play Le Barbier de Séville was still on the boards when Franklin arrived in Paris; he would proceed to write Le Mariage de Figaro. Meanwhile the playwright moved on to drama of another sort, namely the revolution unfolding in America. He became entranced with the American version of liberté and determined that France must midwife its birth. He urged Vergennes to back the American rebels and offered to act as secret agent supplying the support. When Louis approved the project, Beaumarchais created a front firm, Roderigue Hortalez & Co., to disguise the government’s role. A substantial amount of French (and Spanish) money flowed through Beaumarchais’s hands, winding up as weapons and other matériel in America.
Precisely what Beaumarchais was going to get out of the arrangement was unclear. The Americans resisted repaying him, on the reasoning that the money was intended for them, not for him. Whatever his emotional attachment to the American cause, he apparently expected some profit for his pains. It was his bad luck to attach himself to Silas Deane, who himself came under suspicion for profiteering (and eventually came under more than suspicion when he abandoned the American cause). Beaumarchais also antagonized Franklin’s old friend Dubourg, who hoped to corner the French market for American supplies himself, and Jacques Donatien Leray de Chaumont, an intimate of Vergennes who became Franklin’s host. Franklin, recognizing the cloud over Beaumarchais, kept his distance from this ingenious fellow with whom, under different circumstances, he must have found much in common.
Others were less easily put off. A small army of young men—and some not so young—besieged Franklin, seeking commissions in the American army. After nearly a decade and a half of boring peace, the warrior class of the Continent wanted work. A Swiss officer who had served with the Dutch wished to become a lieutenant colonel under General Washington, despite never having risen higher than lieutenant for the Dutch. A veteran of ten years in the French army, writing from Spain, where nothing was brewing, thought he should be a regimental quartermaster. A student from Lyons declared that the time had come for him to accomplish something grand; he would start by killing redcoats in America. An aristocrat from Orléans explained that his forty-two years in the French army had taught him how an army of 25,000 could defeat a host ten times as large; he would be honored to share this secret with General Washington. A German student wrote from Jena declaring candidly that his family could no longer fund his education; he would fight for his daily bread. A Dutch surgeon sought to expand his knowledge of physical trauma in the only place where bodies were being blown apart on a regular basis. A British subject who had been outlawed from England after fighting with the French in Corsica declared his desire to fight with the Americans against those who had treated him so shabbily. The abbess of St.-Michel de Doullens offered the nephew of one of the nuns, a lad of eighteen who, bless his heart, wanted to support his eleven brothers and sisters as a soldier with the Americans. A mother from Châtellerault with sons to spare forwarded three for the front. A Paris matron explained that a young male relation had been serving with the royal guard of Spain but found King Carlos’s incessant hunting exhausting; he wished to rest up against the British.
There were a few diamonds amid the dross. “Count Pulaski of Poland, an officer famous throughout Europe for his bravery and conduct in defence of the liberties of his country against the three invading powers of Russia, Austria and Prussia will have the honour of delivering this into your Excellency’s hands,” Franklin wrote Washington in May 1777, sending along the man who would organize the Continental cavalry. A few months later he recommended “the Baron de Steuben, lately a Lieutenant General in the King of Prussia’s service”—and shortly to impress Prussian discipline on Washington’s troops (at which point the fact that he had been only a captain, rather than a lieutenant general as represented to Franklin, was forgiven). In another letter Franklin endorsed “the Marquis de la Fayette, a young nobleman of great expectations and exceedingly beloved here.” Fulfilling those expectations, Lafayette became just as beloved in America.
Such as these Franklin could recommend forthrightly. In other cases he either ignored the entreaties or wrote something innocuous. “The bearer, Monsr. Dorcet, is extremely desirous of entering in the American service, and goes over at his own expense, contrary to my advice,” Franklin wrote Washington regarding one worthy whose sponsors had to be appeased. Franklin assured Washington he had not given the gentleman in question “the smallest expectation” of a commission. Yet the man insisted on a recommendation, and Franklin obliged, after a fashion. Reiterating that the gentleman refused to be dissuaded, Franklin wrote, “This at least shows a zeal for our cause that merits some regard.”
Even such backhanded compliments became too much for Washington. “Our corps being already formed and fully officered,” the general wrote Franklin from Continental Army headquarters, “the number of foreign gentlemen already commissioned and continually arriving with fresh applications throw such obstacles in the way of any future appointments that every new arrival is only a source of embarrassment to Congress and myself and of disappointment and chagrin to the gentlemen who come over.” Speaking candidly, Washington admitted mistakes in the past that had continuing consequences. “The error we at first fell into of prodigally bestowing rank upon foreigners without examining properly their pretensions, having led us to confer high ranks upon those who had none or of a very inferior degree in their own country, it now happens that those who have really good pretensions, who are men of character, abilities and rank will not be contented unless they are introduced into some of the highest stations of the army.” This was impossible, as Franklin surely appreciated. Washington acknowledged the need to maintain the goodwill of influential Frenchmen, but, please, no more officer candidates.
Yet at Franklin’s end the throngs only grew. “These applications are my perpetual torment,” Franklin wrote Dubourg in the autumn of 1777. “You can have no conception how I am harassed. All my friends are sought out and teased to tease me; great officers of all ranks in all departments, ladies great and small, besides professed solicitors, worry me from morning to night. The noise of every coach now that enters my court terrifies me. I am afraid to accept an invitation to dine abroad, being almost sure of meeting with some officer, or officer’s friend, who as soon as I am put into good humour by a glass or two of champagne begins his attack upon me. Luckily I do not often in my sleep dream myself in these vexatious situations, or I should be afraid of what are now my only hours of comfort.” Dubourg had asked just such a favor for a friend; Franklin concluded his tale of woe with a supplication: “If therefore you have the least remaining kindness for me, if you would not help to drive me out of France, for God’s sake, my dear friend, let this your 23rd application be the last.”
Franklin would have admitted in this case that he was exaggerating for effect; despite the crush of requests he never lost his sense of humor. In a moment of respite he composed a reference for all occasions.
Sir:
The bearer of this who is going to America presses me to give him a letter of recommendation, though I know nothing of him, not even his name. This may seem extraordinary, but I assure you it is not uncommon here. Sometimes indeed one unknown person brings me another equally unknown, to recommend him; and sometimes they recommend one another! As to this gentleman, I must refer you to himself for his character and merits, with which he is certainly better acquainted than I can possibly be.
What America needed was not men but money. By the autumn of 1777 the situation was dire. The Congress had authorized the purchase of war supplies for the American army and the construction of warships for the American navy; now that the bills were coming due the commissioners discovered they lacked the funds to pay the suppliers and the builders. In September, Franklin, Deane, and Lee made a new appeal to the goodwill and self-interest of the French and Spanish courts.
“The Commissioners find themselves extremely embarrassed by their engagements,” they explained in a memorandum drafted by Franklin for Vergennes and the Spanish ambassador. But worse than the embarrassment to themselves was the injury to their country’s credit and cause. They briefly reviewed the events that had brought things to such a pass. Efforts to borrow money from European bankers foundered on the reluctance of the bankers to lend to America while its future hung in the balance. Ships carrying cargoes from America were lost to the British blockade. France’s refusal to countenance the sale of American prizes curtailed the revenues America had derived therefrom. The Spanish court had lately stopped furnishing funds, for reasons unexplained.
Under the circumstances, Franklin and his fellow commissioners thought they should remind the French and Spanish governments what their countries would gain by an American victory. France and Spain would secure access to the American market, which would strengthen them; at the same time Britain’s loss of its monopoly of the American trade would weaken the British, to the additional advantage of France and Spain. Lest the French and Spanish governments get the wrong impression—which was to say, the right impression—the commissioners quickly added, “They offer these advantages, not as putting them to sale for a price, but as ties of the friendship they wish to cultivate with these kingdoms.”
In fact the commissioners did put a price on American actions—an entire list of prices. Eighty thousand blankets cost 56,000 livres. Eighty thousand shirts cost 32,000 livres. One hundred tons of powder cost 200,000 livres. One hundred tons of saltpeter cost 110,000 livres. Eight ships of the line came to 7,730,000 livres. The French and Spanish governments could see for themselves what it cost to continue the war.
As previously, Franklin and the others strove to seem confident even as they warned that without assistance the American cause might collapse. Rumors were circulating of an accommodation that would allow Britain once more to claim the American commerce for itself. The commissioners denied such rumors vigorously. “They can assure your Excellencies that they have no account of any treaty on foot in America for any accommodation; nor do they believe there is any. Nor have any propositions been made by them to the Court of England.” If this sounded like protesting too much, it was intended to. “The Commissioners are firmly of opinion that nothing will induce the Congress to accommodate on the terms of an exclusive commerce with Britain but the despair of obtaining effectual aid and support from Europe.”
Vergennes had been willing to see the Americans sweat, especially after all the trouble they had caused with their privateers, but he was not willing to see them expire. He promised enough cash to keep them going a while longer, and he hinted that France would take care of construction costs for their frigates. He also said to forget about paying Beaumarchais’s company (which corroborated the American belief that the playwright was a profiteer). Yet all this was done under cover; as before, France remained officially aloof.
“We are scarce allowed to know that they give us any aids at all,” Franklin reported to the Congress at the end of November 1777. “But we are left to imagine, if we please, that the cannon, arms &c. which we have received and sent are the effects of private benevolence and generosity.” An open alliance was still the goal, yet the phlegmatic Franklin noted an advantage in its absence: “It leaves America the glory of working out her deliverance by her own virtue and bravery.”
At that particular moment such a prediction required a leap of faith. After the British victory on Long Island, General Howe chased Washington off Manhattan Island, across the Hudson River and New Jersey, and across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. Washington assumed that the British objective was Philadelphia; he began destroying boats to keep the Delaware between Howe and the American capital. “We have prevented them from crossing,” Washington wrote on December 17, “but how long we shall be able to do it, God only knows.”
What God knew—and Washington learned, to his relief—was that Howe in fact was not driving for Philadelphia. The British commander had decided to spend the winter in New York, with isolated garrisons—manned in several instances by Hessian troops—posted at various towns between there and the Delaware.
Washington, desperate for a victory that would restore at least a little morale and thereby diminish the desertions that made the collapse of his army a frightening possibility, took advantage of the isolation of a Hessian unit at Trenton. Recrossing the ice-clogged Delaware during a storm of rain and snow on Christmas night, Washington struck the hungover Trenton garrison at dawn the next day. The Hessian commander was hardly awake before an American bullet felled him; his confused subordinates surrendered by the hundreds. It was a brilliant victory, accomplished with negligible American losses.
Washington’s hopes of following up with an assault on the British magazine at New Brunswick melted before the rapid arrival of reinforcements from New York under General Cornwallis, but the triumph at Trenton guaranteed that the Continental Army would survive the winter. The Congress returned to Philadelphia, whence it had fled on the rumors of Howe’s advance; there it received Franklin’s optimistic report, which afforded additional reason for hope.
Unfortunately, by the time that report arrived, General Howe was in the process of preparing to evict the Congress once more. Coordinating with his brother’s ships, the British commander loaded 18,000 troops into transports and vanished into the Atlantic. The land-bound Washington, and the equally terrestrial Congress, could only guess where he had gone. “Not a word yet from Howe’s fleet,” John Adams wrote his wife on August 20. “The most general suspicion now is that it is gone to Charlestown S.C. But it is a wild supposition. It may be right, however, for Howe is a wild general.”
It was wrong. Howe turned up not in South Carolina but in Maryland, at the head of the Chesapeake Bay. Quite evidently he intended to take Philadelphia from the rear. Washington hurried southwest to cut him off, and although he slowed the British advance at Brandywine Creek, Howe ground steadily forward. In mid-September the Congress once more fled, this time into the Pennsylvania hinterland; shortly thereafter Howe occupied the capital.
The loss of Philadelphia was a serious blow, but for most of the summer the really threatening news came from the north. General John Burgoyne had spent the winter in England, galloping with the king in Hyde Park, gallivanting with the ladies about London, and gabbing about how he would win the war with a thrust from Canada down to New York City. The government decided to give him his head and several thousand troops, with which, upon his return to Quebec, he set out for Lake Champlain.
All went well for Burgoyne at first. He reached Fort Ticonderoga at the head of the long lake by the beginning of July; within the week that strong spot was his. He pursued the American forces south, toward the Hudson, certain that victory was in his grasp. Once on the Hudson he would float magnificently down to Manhattan, thereby slicing the American colonies in two. Surrender would follow shortly, and probably an earldom for the man who forced it.
Amid his daydreams Burgoyne found time to draft a proclamation to the peoples still resisting the inevitable. “In consciousness of Christianity, my Royal Master’s clemency and the honour of soldiership,” he called on Americans to return to the British fold. If they did, all would be well. If not, “I have but to give stretch to the Indian forces under my direction, and they amount to thousands, to overtake the hardened enemies of Great Britain and America…. The messengers of justice and of wrath await them in the field, and devastation, famine and every concomitant horror that a reluctant but indispensable prosecution of military duty must occasion, will bar the way to their return.”
The Presbyterians and other dissenters of New England did not take kindly to the preachments of an Anglican general, but what really infuriated them was Burgoyne’s threat to unleash the Indians. In that wilderness district the memories of the French and Indian War still burned, and Burgoyne’s boast made them burn the more.
To capitalize on the combustion, Washington replaced General Philip Schuyler, a stodgy Dutch patroon distrustful of the democratic tendencies of the New England militia, with Horatio Gates, an old shoe who openly admired the rank and file. Between Burgoyne and Gates, American recruitment swelled, and the farther the former got from his Canadian base, the larger the latter’s army grew.
Franklin, the veteran of wilderness warfare, had predicted years past that the forests would swallow any force Britain was foolish enough to send against America; Burgoyne made the philosopher a seer. South of Ticonderoga, Burgoyne and his men found themselves slowed by narrow roads unsuited to the passage of armies and artillery, soaked by rushing streams rendered more difficult by the Americans’ destruction of bridges, blocked by massive trees felled by American axes, weakened by short rations getting shorter by the week, and chilled by the deepening autumn. Unable to advance, unwilling to retreat, Burgoyne floundered. When the Americans repulsed a relief column coming up the Hudson and scattered another approaching from the west, the British were trapped. The final battle near Saratoga featured the mercurial American Benedict Arnold, who had recently been relieved of his command but now led by sheer ambition and bravery, hurling his men again and again upon the British lines, which staggered and broke.
The battle finished Burgoyne. Negotiating terms of surrender took several days; upon completion they erased the danger from the north, the threat to the integrity of the colonies, and most of the smugness with which Britain had entered the war.
“When all are ready for it, a small matter may suddenly bring it on,” Franklin had said regarding French entry into the war. The American victory at Saratoga was more than a small thing, and by the time news of the triumph reached Europe, all were ready.
The first report took Franklin by surprise, a mere five days after he had concluded that America might have to win her deliverance by her own virtue and bravery. An American messenger was said to have landed at Nantes with a dispatch from the front; in the late morning of December 4 this young man, Jonathan Loring Austin, galloped into the courtyard of Franklin’s residence. “Sir, is Philadelphia taken?” demanded Franklin, his mind on the danger to the American capital—and his home.
“Yes, sir,” replied Austin, whereupon Franklin wrung his hands and turned to go back inside.
“But, sir, I have greater news than that,” the breathless courier continued. “General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners of war!”
This changed everything, of course. At once Franklin circulated the welcome news among the influentials of Paris and Versailles, with a gloss highlighting Gates’s accomplishment and minimizing Howe’s. The version that went to Vergennes described “the total reduction of the force under General Burgoyne” and the difficulties confronting Howe. At the time of the courier’s departure from America, “General Gates was about to send reinforcements to General Washington, who was near Philadelphia with his army. General Howe was in possession of that city, but having no communication with his fleet, it was hoped he would soon be reduced to submit to the same terms with Burgoyne, whose capitulation we enclose.”
Perhaps Franklin believed that Howe’s end was near; certainly he judged it politic to appear so. When an acquaintance commiserated upon hearing of the loss of America’s capital, Franklin replied, “You mistake the matter. Instead of Howe taking Philadelphia, Philadelphia has taken Howe.”
Before the future could prove him wrong—as it did, soon enough—Franklin moved to exploit the recent past. In this he received encouragement from Vergennes. The foreign minister sent his secretary, Conrad Alexandre Gérard, to Franklin’s apartment. As Arthur Lee recorded the conversation, “He said as there now appeared no doubt of the ability and resolution of the states to maintain their independency, he could assure them it was wished they would reassume their former proposition of an alliance, or any new one they might have, and that it could be done none too soon.”
The French had reason for haste. The British, alarmed at the prospect of an alliance between America and France, were scurrying to prevent it. To Paris came envoys informal and official to meet with Franklin and determine whether the Americans might settle their dispute with Britain without involving the French. Sir Philip Gibbes resumed an earlier conversation (of February 1777) in which Franklin had hinted—according to Gibbes’s recounting—that an Anglo-American confederation for war and peace (“to make peace and war as one state”) and for trade might follow Britain’s recognition of American independence. If accurately reported, it was merely a suggestion, of which nothing came, as Britain was in no mood to grant independence. Eleven months later, independence was a de facto reality, and Britain’s mood had changed. But so had America’s. Franklin told Gibbes it would cost Britain more now to end the conflict. But he refused to say how much more. “America is ready to make peace. If Great Britain desires to make peace, let her propose the terms to the Commissioners here.” At the same time he warned Gibbes that whatever Britain offered would be communicated to the French government. America, he said, was new at treaty-making and wished to employ the experience of its French friends.
Needless to say, this was not what London intended. “I am sorry, I much lament, sir,” Gibbes replied, “that your engagements with France oblige you to submit to her the terms of a peace between Great Britain and America.”
“Do not mistake me,” Franklin rejoined. “I did not say we should submit them to France. I said, distrusting ourselves, we should consult France.” Yet any British offer had better be good. “Terms that come voluntarily, and shew generosity, will do honour to Great Britain and may engage the confidence of America.”
Gibbes had nothing to offer, but Franklin’s next visitor did. Paul Wentworth was a British spy who came straight from the office of William Eden, the head of British intelligence. “I called on 72 yesterday,” Wentworth reported to Eden, employing the code for Franklin (which Eden interlined for posterity upon receiving the letter). “We remained together two hours before 51 [Silas Deane] joined us, when the conversation ceased.” In the course of the conversation Wentworth introduced a letter from Eden. “I said if he would pledge his honour to me that he would not, on any account whatever, now or hereafter mention the substance or any part of a letter I wished to show him, I would read him one, which induced me to come to 144 [Paris]. He agreed, and I read the first and second pages, ending in unqualified 107 [independence].” Franklin listened carefully. “He said it was a very interesting, sensible letter,” Wentworth reported. “Pity it did not come a little sooner.”
Wentworth had not said whom the letter was from. Franklin wanted to know. Wentworth declined to identify Eden, beyond indicating that the author was someone with the ear of the king.
This was not good enough for Franklin. In the small talk before Wentworth got to the letter, Franklin had explained how unsatisfactory had been previous informal efforts at reconciliation; he mentioned specifically Lord Howe’s attempt during his—Franklin’s—final months in England. The only result of such efforts then was lost time; the result now would be lost lives. Franklin thereupon lectured Wentworth on British barbarities in the cruel and unjust war against America.
Wentworth tried to return Franklin to the point of his visit, but Franklin refused. “I never knew him so excentric,” Wentworth reported to Eden. “Nobody says less generally and keeps a point more closely in view; but he was diffuse and unmethodical today.” Gradually the spy caught on to Franklin’s game. “I must conclude he was involved in engagements which bound him too closely to attend to any propositions.”
As indeed he was. Those engagements gained impetus from Franklin’s talks with Gibbes and Wentworth, of which he allowed Vergennes to learn, without revealing details. Vergennes’s eagerness for an alliance, now that the time had come—and now that Britain seriously sought to prevent it—was evident in the foreign minister’s characterization of the negotiations as “lively and long”; for in fact the talks took less than three comparatively uncontentious weeks.
The result was a pair of accords: a treaty of amity and commerce, granting each country unbettered access to the markets of the other; and a treaty of alliance, pledging French support for American independence and American support for France in the event of an Anglo-French war.