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The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II was traveling incognito in France during this period, and frequented the same salons as Franklin. Watching Franklin’s chess game with the Duchess of Bourbon, he was asked why he did not share the general enthusiasm for America. “I am a king by trade,” he replied.
George III felt the same way, although most nights he had little more reason to lose sleep over the Americans’ activities than the Holy Roman emperor did. Even after the American victory at Saratoga the war went poorly for the rebels. An American defeat at Germantown left British forces in control of Philadelphia, and efforts to keep the British fleet from reaching and reinforcing the city failed after an imaginative scheme for sinking the British vessels misfired. David Bushnell had tinkered with an underwater boat—“Bushnell’s turtle,” it was called—that would torpedo the enemy below the waterline; when this encountered technical difficulties, Bushnell switched to floating bombs. He stuffed kegs with explosives and surreptitiously drifted them down the river toward the British fleet. Most missed, and the scheme was discovered when a bargeman lifted one of the kegs from the water, setting it off and killing himself and several companions. Although no British ships were destroyed, the very thought of bobbing ruin put the British on edge. Soldiers were arrayed along the riverbank to fire at suspicious objects in the water; by one account, just as the scare was abating, a farmer’s wife accidentally dropped a keg of cheese in the river, sparking a renewed alert and another outpouring of lead into the water.
As General Howe wintered in Philadelphia, warmed by his mistress and assisted in the governance of the city by Franklin’s old friend and ally Joseph Galloway, Washington and the American army froze on the windy hillsides of Valley Forge. They arrived worn from their failed campaign against Howe, and they grew wearier from the effort to construct winter quarters from the ground up. In dark huts fourteen feet by sixteen they shivered and went hungry. The entire commissary when the winter began consisted of twenty-five barrels of flour—this for 11,000 officers and men. “Firecake”—a leavenless pancake cooked over campfire—and water was the sole fare. “What have you for your dinner, boys?,” an army surgeon recalled the officers asking. “Nothing but firecake and water, sir.” “What is your supper, lads?” “Firecake and water, sir.” “What have you got for breakfast?” “Firecake and water, sir.” The surgeon, in charge of maintaining the army’s health on this meager regime, cursed those responsible. “The Lord send that our Commissary of Purchases may live on firecake and water till their glutted guts are turned to pasteboard.”
Feeding the army was far from the only challenge Washington faced. Clothing the men was just as hard. “We have, by a field return this day made,” he reported to Congress on December 23, “no less than 2898 men now in camp unfit for duty because they are bare foot and otherwise naked.” Lack of blankets forced the men to spend nights crowded around fires “instead of taking comfortable rest in a natural way.” Washington normally bore hardship stoically, but the trials of his men forced him to speak his mind about those state legislatures that postured bravely but failed to provide what the troops needed. “It is a much easier and less distressing thing to draw remonstrances in a comfortable room by a good fire side than to occupy a cold bleak hill and sleep under frost and snow without clothes or blankets.” Unless some decided change took place, “this army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things: Starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence.”
Washington opted for the last. Foraging parties were drawn from those with shoes and trousers and the strength to stand. The pickings were slim in that part of Pennsylvania, which was crowded with refugees—including both the Congress and the Bache family. So the parties were sent to other parts of the state, and into New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland. Despite the urgings of the Congress, Washington hesitated to seize what he required, lest the people turn against the revolutionary cause. Some of his subordinates were less fastidious, arguing that in the case of New Jersey and Delaware, at any rate, those states were infested with Loyalists who would not have supported the revolutionary cause even if it came with kid gloves and cash.
In camp, Washington attempted to maintain morale by keeping the men busy. Baron von Steuben arrived with his letter from Franklin and commenced drilling the troops. He lacked English beyond the basics, but his prestige as an officer in the army of Frederick the Great counted for much where military professionals were few. Discipline improved, and with it the mood in camp. (Certain cultural problems would persist, however. “Believe me, dear Baron, that the task I had to perform was not an easy one,” Steuben later explained to the Prussian ambassador in Paris. “My good republicans [that is, the Americans] wanted everything in the English style; our great and good allies [the French] everything according to the French mode; and when I presented a plate of sauerkraut dressed in the Prussian style, they all wanted to throw it out of the window. Nevertheless, by the force of proving by Goddams that my cookery was the best, I overcame the prejudices of the former; but the second liked me as little in the forests of America as they did on the plains of Rossbach.”)
For all the hardship, Washington and the army survived the winter at Valley Forge—partly because by the standards of old-timers in that country, the winter of 1777–78 was relatively mild. The arrival of spring brought additional good news: that France had embraced the American cause. The effect of the alliance was felt most immediately when the British, under Howe’s replacement Henry Clinton, evacuated Philadelphia for New York, the better to fend off the expected French attack.
The first American cavalry unit entered Philadelphia fifteen minutes after the last British troops departed, and on a rising tide of American morale Washington’s forces harried Clinton’s across New Jersey. Washington was tempted to strike directly at the long, straggling British line, but after an engagement at Monmouth was mishandled (leading to the court-martial and conviction of Charles Lee), Washington was reduced to watching the British make their escape across the Hudson estuary to New York.
Had he delayed them just another week the war might have been materially shortened. On July 11 a French fleet of sixteen warships—which could have contested Clinton’s crossing of the Hudson—arrived off Sandy Hook. As it was, the fleet admiral, the Comte d’Estaing, was content to hover outside New York harbor, prevented from attacking the city by shallow water and the British guns that guarded the entrance. Meanwhile Washington crossed the Hudson upstream from the city and settled in at White Plains to keep Clinton from escaping by land.
With the capital clear, the Congress returned to Philadelphia and voted to terminate the American commission in Paris. Three heads had been better than one in negotiating treaties, the legislators thought, but now that Louis’s government had recognized the United States, diplomatic precedent indicated representation by a single minister plenipotentiary. And where a certain skepticism, even suspicion, was called for in negotiators driving hard for a bargain, an expansive friendliness ought to guide the actions of an ambassador to a wartime ally. Franklin was the obvious choice, and the Congress made it.
Franklin delivered his letter of appointment to “Our Great Faithful & Beloved Friend and Ally,” as the Congress styled Louis, in February 1779. The letter requested his majesty to accept Franklin’s credentials and “to give entire credit to every thing which he shall deliver on our part.”
In fact Louis would have been wise to discount one of Franklin’s first messages. The Congress had instructed Franklin to ask the king for a French expeditionary force against Halifax and Quebec; Franklin unilaterally added British-occupied Rhode Island to the target list. In time Washington would accept the necessity of inviting French troops onto the soil of the United States, but for the moment the memories of frontier service against the French were too strong. Though the American commander wanted French forces to harass Britain, he preferred they do it elsewhere than from American soil. Fortunately for Franklin, Louis was not ready to send soldiers across the Atlantic, and the request languished, sparing Franklin substantial embarrassment.
At seventy-three Franklin was an unlikely one to be swept away by zest for battle; the inspiration of his indiscretion may have been a young man nearly fifty-two years his junior. Lafayette was back in France after a brilliant beginning in America. Armed with Franklin’s letter of recommendation; with a desire to avenge his father, a colonel of grenadiers killed in the Seven years’ War; with a passion for la gloire; and, not least important, with a large independent income, he had convinced the Congress to make him a major general—at the tender age of nineteen. He immediately fell in love with Washington (“the God-like American hero” was how he described him to Franklin). Washington reciprocated by taking the boy general under his wing, almost as the son he never had. Lafayette was bloodied in his first battle, which endeared him to his men, and he shared their hardships at Valley Forge, which endeared him still more. A daring midwinter “irruption into Canada” by Lafayette and a handful of men foundered before launch, leaving Lafayette impatient for action. “Dear general,” he wrote Washington, “I know very well that you will do everything to procure me the only thing I am ambitious of—glory.” His ambition was satisfied slightly at the battle of Monmouth in June 1778, in which he performed with conspicuous bravery but incomplete success.
France’s entry into the war brought tears of joy and a request to return to his homeland to prepare the troops he was certain must be marching toward the docks already. The Congress consented; yet lest the courageous general forget his adopted country it voted to award him a special sword, which Franklin would present in France after it was fashioned. A minor problem arose on the return voyage when the crew—consisting largely of British prisoners and deserters—mutinied. But Lafayette unsheathed his regular sword and cowed the mutineers.
A problem of a different sort arose on arrival in Paris, when he was reminded that his service in America had violated a direct order of the king (given before the alliance with the United States). To his chagrin, the young marquis was placed under house arrest. His detention postponed a meeting he had requested with Franklin, to whom he carried a letter from Washington extolling his “zeal, military ardour and talents.”
Louis let Lafayette stew for a week before issuing a royal pardon. But he insisted that Lafayette come to court to apologize in person. This provoked additional bit-champing. “In our kingly countries we have a foolish law called Etiquette that any one, though a sensible man, must absolutely follow,” Lafayette complained to Franklin. His enthusiastic reception at court momentarily alleviated his impatience. Even Marie Antoinette, who had laughed at his awkwardness on the dance floor and his inability to hold his liquor, joined the acclaim. The ladies of the court vied for his favors.
Yet he must return to soldiering. After Monmouth but before leaving for France, Lafayette had participated in a botched attempt to break the British hold on Newport, Rhode Island. Mortified by this failure, he ached to make it right. Lafayette was the courier who brought Franklin’s commission as minister plenipotentiary and his instructions from the Congress about asking France for help attacking Halifax and Quebec; he may have intimated that an attack on Rhode Island was an oral addendum to the written instructions—perhaps too sensitive to commit to paper. Franklin should have been shrewd enough to know the difference, but he may simply have been moved by the young hero’s obvious devotion to the American cause.
When the expedition to America was delayed, Lafayette proposed something more audacious: a strike at England itself. Louis’s tentative approval set him aquiver. “My blood is boiling in my veins,” he declared. In another letter, to Admiral d’Estaing, Lafayette warned, “If you undertake an attack on England and land troops and I am not there with you, I shall hang myself!”
Franklin would not have put his own feelings the same way, but he shared the broad sentiment, and he endorsed the expedition with enthusiasm. “I admire much the activity of your genius, and the strong desire you have of being continually employed against the common enemy,” Franklin wrote Lafayette. “It is certain that the coasts of England and Scotland are extremely open and defenceless. There are also many rich towns near the sea, which 4 or 5000 men, landing unexpectedly, might easily surprise and destroy, or exact from them a heavy contribution, taking a part in ready money and hostages for the rest.” Bristol, for example, ought to be worth 48 million livres, Liverpool the same, Bath 12 million, Lancaster 6 million. If the raiding parties included cavalry, all the better. “It would spread terror to much greater distances, and the whole would occasion movements and marches of troops that must put the enemy to prodigious expence and harass them exceedingly.”
Franklin did not presume to judge the military merits of one strategy over another. But if history was any guide, the very audacity of the endeavor augured well for it. “In war, attempts thought to be impossible do often for that very reason become possible and practicable, because nobody expects them and no precautions are taken to guard against them.” Franklin concluded with an appeal he knew Lafayette could not resist: “Those are the kind of undertakings of which the success affords the most glory.”
In this same letter Franklin noted that “much will depend on a prudent and brave sea commander who knows the coasts.” He had just the man in mind, although some wondered if “prudent” was the appropriate word. John Paul Jones had been born simply John Paul, the son of the gardener of a Scottish squire. Young John left home and went to sea at the age of twelve—about the same age Franklin thought of doing so from Boston. By nineteen he had visited Virginia, studied navigation, and advanced to first mate aboard a slaver making the notorious Middle Passage from Africa to America. Before long he had a command of his own, a Dumfries merchantman to the West Indies. Paul proved a taskmaster who brooked no dereliction; he flogged crewmen with gusto and some regularity. One day at Tobago he flogged the ship’s carpenter more severely than usual, and the man died. The carpenter’s father brought charges of murder against Paul, who was jailed. Eventually he persuaded others aboard the ship to affirm his innocence, and the charges were dropped, although a cloud of suspicion continued to hover about his head. In 1773, while commanding another ship, his crew challenged his authority, and in a scuffle the leader of the challenge was killed by Paul’s sword. Paul testified he was merely defending himself, but this time the witnesses were hostile, and he judged flight the better part of valor. A few weeks later he was in Virginia with a new surname: Jones.
During the next two years he discovered neither another ship nor work ashore. Yet the misfortunes of the British empire promised an end to his own, and when war broke out with Britain he sided with the Americans. He hurried to Philadelphia and received a commission as a lieutenant, upgraded to captain once the Congress acquired a few more ships. Commanding the Providence and then the Ranger, he won a reputation as the scourge of British shipping. In one especially daring raid he swooped down upon the Scottish coast with the aim of taking hostage the Earl of Selkirk, to be traded for American prisoners. But the earl was out, and Jones’s crew satisfied themselves with stealing the family silver—which Jones subsequently purchased from them and returned to its owner.
The entry of France into the war allowed, and required, Jones to coordinate his actions with those of the French. As an American officer he reported to Franklin, the ranking representative of the United States government, but in the common interests of the alliance—and because Franklin was a self-admitted novice in naval matters—the minister plenipotentiary followed the lead of the French navy minister, Antoine Sartine. It was Sartine who prepared the invasion of England, and Franklin who urged the impetuous Jones to cooperate. “The Marquis de Lafayette will be with you soon,” Franklin wrote.
It has been observed that joint expeditions of land and sea forces often miscarry, through jealousies and misunderstanding between the officers of the different corps. This must happen when there are little minds actuated more by personal views of profit or honour to themselves than by the warm and sincere desire of good to their country. Knowing you both as I do, and your just manner of thinking on these occasions, I am confident nothing of the kind can happen between you, and that it is unnecessary for me to recommend to either of you that condescension, mutual goodwill and harmony, which contribute so much to success in such undertakings.
Of course, if it really had been unnecessary, Franklin would not have written. In fact Franklin knew that Jones was touchy on matters of rank and precedence. Franklin felt compelled to remind Captain Jones that General Lafayette outranked him and therefore would command the ground forces. “But the command of the ships will be entirely in you, in which I am persuaded that what ever authority his rank might in strictness give him, he will not have the least desire to interfere with you.” Because the operation joined not simply land and sea forces but American and French, “a cool prudent conduct in the chiefs is therefore the more necessary.” Jones need not fear. “There is honour enough to be got for both of you if the expedition is conducted with a prudent unanimity.”
Franklin followed this exhortation with Jones’s formal instructions. Captain Jones was to accept the French forces Lafayette brought him and conduct them where the marquis requested. Once the troops were landed, Jones was to assist them “by all means in your power.” He must stay close: “You are during the expedition never to depart from the troops so as not to be able to protect them or to secure their retreat in case of a repulse.” Englishmen captured should be treated with care. “As many of your officers and people have lately escaped from English prisons either in Europe or America, you are to be particularly attentive to their conduct toward the prisoners which the fortune of war may throw in your hands, lest the resentment of the more than barbarous usage by the English in many places towards the Americans should occasion a retaliation, and an imitation of what ought rather to be detested and avoided for the sake of humanity and for the honour of our country.” Similar sentiments should inform the captain’s conduct in other areas. “Although the English have wantonly burnt many defenceless towns in America, you are not to follow this example, unless where a reasonable ransom is refused, in which case your own generous feelings as well as this instruction will induce you to give timely notice of your intention that sick and ancient persons, women and children may be first removed.”
Jones replied that Franklin could count on him. “Your liberal and noble-minded instructions would make a coward brave. You have called up every sentiment of public virtue in my breast, and it shall be my pride and ambition in the strict pursuit of your instructions to deserve success.”
Jones, who closed his letter rather fulsomely, even for that gushy era (“I am and shall be to the end of my life, with the most affectionate esteem and respect, Honoured and dear Sir, your most obliged friend and most obedient very humble servant”), seems to have been sincere. He took the ship Sartine provided him, the Duras, and rechristened it the Bonhomme Richard.
And it was in the Bonhomme Richard that Jones made himself an immortal of the waves. Logistics and politics scuttled the invasion of England, leaving Jones to put to sea against the British navy. In September 1779 he locked up in a death struggle against the Serapis, a much larger, more heavily armed vessel. Two of Jones’s biggest guns exploded in the faces of their gunners at the start of the fight, while the eighteen-pounders of the Serapis battered the Bonhomme Richard. The captain of the British vessel, convinced he had won, shouted to Jones, offering him the chance to strike his colors. Jones replied defiantly, “No! I’ll sink, but I’m damned if I’ll strike!” (This was remembered much later by one witness as, “I have not yet begun to fight!” and so transmitted to posterity.)
Realizing that survival required closing with the Serapis, Jones rammed his bow into her stern, fastening the two vessels together, starboard to starboard, muzzle to muzzle. While the British guns blasted holes in the Bonhomme Richard, Jones’s American and French crew climbed the rigging and rained down musket fire and grenades upon the British. One grenade landed in the magazine of the Serapis, causing a huge explosion. As the hull of the Bonhomme Richard filled with water, the decks of the Serapis filled with blood. “The scene was dreadful beyond the reach of language,” Jones reported to Franklin. “A person must have been an eyewitness to form a just idea of the tremendous scenes of carnage, wreck and ruin which every where appeared. Humanity cannot but recoil and lament that war should be capable of producing such fatal consequences.”
Some of Jones’s men thought so too, and implored him to strike the colors before the ship sank and they all died. He ignored their pleas and urged them to redouble their efforts, leading by the example of manning a gun himself. Finally the nerve of the British commander broke. The Serapis was Jones’s—which was a good thing, since the mortally wounded Bonhomme Richard went to a watery grave.
Franklin exulted at the news of the victory. “For some days after the arrival of your express,” he wrote Jones, “scarce any thing was talked of at Paris and Versailles but your cool conduct and persevering bravery during that terrible conflict.”
Glorious as it was, Jones’s victory hardly won the war, nor did it much ease the financial strain America—and Franklin—faced. Jones, hoping to capitalize on the good feeling at the French court, asked Franklin to request the money he needed to refit his ship. “I must acquaint you that there is not the least probability of obtaining it,” Franklin replied, “and therefore I cannot ask it.” Jones did not want merely to fix what was broken but to improve the sea-and battle-worthiness of his vessel by sheathing the hull in copper. “It is totally out of the question,” Franklin said. “I am not authorized to do it, if I had the money; and I have not the money for it, if I had orders.” Jones was far from the only one calling on Franklin for funds, but he was the latest; as a result he received more than his share of Franklin’s frustration. “For God’s sake, be sparing, unless you mean to make me a bankrupt.”
The alliance with France brought French resources into the conflict on America’s side but did not place them at America’s disposal. After four years of fighting, the credit of the United States was nearly nil. The Congress continued to finesse the problem at home—imperfectly, to be sure—by issuing more and more currency. Troops and other creditors of the government could accept the Continental dollars or nothing at all. Franklin, the optimist, perceived a silver lining in the disastrous depreciation of the currency. “Though an evil to particulars, there is some advantage to the public in the depreciation, as large nominal values are more easily paid in taxes.”
Foreign governments and individuals were under no compulsion to accept American paper. Indeed they marveled at the Americans’ system of financing the war. “The whole is a mystery even to the politicians,” Franklin said: “how we have been able to continue a war four years without money, and how we could pay with paper that had no previously fixed fund appropriated specifically to redeem it.” Franklin himself sometimes marveled. “This currency as we manage it is a wonderful machine. It performs its office when we issue it; it pays and clothes troops, and provides victuals and ammunition; and when we are obliged to issue a quantity excessive, it pays itself off by depreciation.”
At times Franklin felt that Americans’ hearts were not really in the struggle—at least as it related to finances. “The extravagant luxury of our country in the midst of all its distresses is to me amazing,” he wrote John Jay, president of the Congress. “When the difficulties are so great to find remittances to pay for the arms and ammunition necessary for our defence, I am astonished and vexed to find, upon enquiry, that much the greatest part of the Congress interest-bills come to pay for tea, and a great part of the remainder is ordered to be laid out in gewgaws and superfluities.” This was a scandal for America—not to mention a pain for him. “It makes me grudge the trouble of examining, entering and accepting them, which indeed takes a great deal of time.”
Franklin chastised his own daughter, Sally, for her part in this national extravagance.
When I began to read your account of the high prices of goods—a pair of gloves seven dollars, a yard of common gauze twenty-four dollars, and that it now required a fortune to maintain a family in a very plain way—I expected you would conclude with telling me that every body as well as yourself was grown frugal and industrious. And I could scarce believe my eyes in reading forward that there never was so much dressing and pleasure going on, and that you yourself wanted black pins and feathers from France, to appear, I suppose, in the mode!
He refused to indulge her. “If you wear your cambric ruffles as I do, and take care not to mend the holes, they will come in time to be lace; and feathers, my dear girl, may be had in America from every cock’s tail.”
Sally responded with more than a touch of hurt. She explained she had simply wanted to look presentable when visiting General and Mrs. Washington and the elected officials of the government. “Though I never loved dress so much as to wish to be particularly fine, yet I will never go out when I cannot appear so as to do credit to my family and husband.” Perhaps her father did not appreciate what it meant to be driven from home by an enemy army, and how it made her long for her old, settled life. “This winter approaches with so many horrors that I shall not want any thing to go abroad in, if I can be comfortable at home. My spirits, which I have kept up during my being drove about from place to place much better than most people I met with, have been lowered by nothing but the depreciation of the money, which has been amazing lately. So home will be the place for me this winter, as I cannot get a common winter cloak and hat but just under two hundred pounds.”
There was other worrisome news from Philadelphia. Sally’s husband, Richard, reported that Franklin’s foe Arthur Lee was up to his old machinations. Lee sent the Congress a long memorial asserting that behind Franklin’s smooth façade and tremendous popularity he was serving America poorly and was slandering Lee himself besides. Lee described Franklin as a “great politician, at least in the European estimate of that character.” With affected sorrow he added, “Would to God he were in the truest sense of the word the greatest politician in Europe! Would to God he were the firmest patriot of the age, and that his talents had been employed with half that assiduity in promoting the cause of his country that his wiles have been in weaving little plots, sowing pernicious dissensions, countenancing and covering the most corrupt and selfish use of all the opportunities which his station furnished!”
Franklin was hardly happy to hear this, but he was beyond wasting energy on Lee. He had never done Lee the slightest injury, he told Bache, nor given any just cause for offense. But a good reputation and popular approval were more than the small minds of Lee and his allies could bear. He would not answer their charges unless the Congress specifically instructed him to do so. “I take no other revenge of such enemies than to let them remain in the miserable situation in which their malignant natures have placed them, by endeavouring to support an estimable character; and thus by continuing the reputation the world has hitherto indulged me with, I shall continue them in their present state of damnation.”
Yet there was one part of the campaign against him he could not easily ignore. His critics complained that his employment of Temple amounted to nepotism, and demanded Temple’s removal. The allegation was accurate enough (and in keeping with Franklin’s fixed habit of employing relatives). This may have been why he rejected it so vociferously. Far from being censured, he told Bache, he should be congratulated. “Methinks it is rather some merit that I have rescued a young man from the danger of being a Tory and fixed him in honest republican Whig principles.” Besides, Temple was showing real character and ability and promised in time to be of genuine service to his country.
There was more than this to Franklin’s defense of Temple—something much more personal. “It is enough that I have lost my son; would they add my grandson! An old man of 70, I undertook a winter voyage at the command of the Congress, and for the public service, with no other attendant to take care of me. I am continued here in a foreign country, where, if I am sick, his filial attention comforts me, and, if I die, I have a child to close my eyes and take care of my remains.”
Franklin knew that Richard and Sally would be even more interested in hearing of his other grandson. “Ben, if I should live long enough to want it, is like to be another comfort to me,” he explained. The younger boy had started at boarding school near Passy, but his grandfather had lately sent him to Geneva. “I intend him for a Presbyterian as well as a republican.”
One reason Franklin begrudged his daughter luxuries like pins and feathers was that he heard daily of Americans who lacked even necessaries. Franklin regularly received letters regarding the plight of American prisoners of war held in England. Typically these were sailors captured from American privateers; routinely they were tossed into prison and treated as common felons—and worse, as traitors and pirates.
At times during the eighteenth century, war could be a gentlemanly endeavor. Captured officers were regularly paroled—that is, sent home upon their promise to engage no longer in hostilities. Such had been the fate of General Burgoyne after Saratoga. Soldiers of the rank and file were often exchanged for their counterparts from the other side.
But the British government refused to accord such courtesies to captured Americans. London contended they were not belligerents but rebels. To an early application from Franklin regarding treatment of prisoners, the British ambassador in Paris, Lord Stormont, responded curtly, “The King’s ambassador receives no letters from rebels, unless they come to implore his Majesty’s mercy.”
Such might have finished Franklin’s hopes for ameliorating the prisoners’ plight, if not for the assistance he gained from others in Britain. The Parliamentary opposition to the North ministry seized on the suspension of habeas corpus, as it related to the American prisoners, and attacked the government for hypocritically undermining essential English institutions in the name of defending them. English prisons were a scandal in the best of times, and though conditions there pricked few consciences regarding regular felons, the harsh treatment accorded the Americans elicited letters to editors and other forms of low-grade protest.
To publicize the prisoners’ plight, Franklin sent a special envoy, John Thornton, to England to visit the prisons that held the Americans. Thornton had to bribe his way past the sentries; he did so with money supplied by Franklin. He reported prisoners half naked, constantly hungry, and, in dozens of cases, confined for weeks at a time to the “black holes,” cramped, windowless dungeons where “the air doth not only become foul, but the stench sometimes insupportable.”
Thornton’s report supplied Franklin the basis for initiating a regular program of prisoner relief. English prisoners in those days were required to contribute to the cost of their detention, and while this might be difficult for those from poor families, it was nearly impossible for Americans with families thousands of miles away—families that were often ignorant of the whereabouts of their kin (or even whether the kin were still alive). Franklin diverted monies that might have gone to purchase weapons for Washington’s army, creating a fund from which prisoners could draw some eighteen pence per week.
This was a temporary expedient; his larger goal was the release of the prisoners. Until 1779 he had little leverage to apply against the prison doors, lacking much meaningful to trade. But the raids of John Paul Jones, who shared Franklin’s concern for the imprisoned Americans, netted hundreds of British sailors. Franklin wrote David Hartley, a member of Parliament who had served as a mediator when Franklin was working with Lord Howe in London before the outbreak of war, and suggested a swap.
The British government, although inclined to respond, did so diffidently. Each man to be released had to receive a pardon for his treason from the king, which took time. During this time recruiters for the Royal Navy attempted to persuade the Americans to defect, painting a grim picture of America’s prospects generally and a dire one of theirs personally in the event they were captured again. But finally the exchanges began. One hundred Americans were sent to France, and one hundred Britons returned to Britain. Franklin was encouraged. “This is to continue till all are exchanged,” he assured the Congress.
It did not continue nearly that long. The British government, apparently believing that the Americans lost more from having seamen detained than Britain did, threw additional hurdles in the way of the exchanges. It refused to trade Americans for British captured by French vessels or captured in America. After Franklin ran out of qualifying British prisoners, the exchanges clanked to a halt.
So Franklin adopted other—unsanctioned—methods. Escape from English prisons was hardly impossible, especially for Americans who spoke the language and looked like the locals. Sometimes all it took was money to bribe the guards. One successful escapee described how, after “oiling the sentry’s conscience,” he simply strolled out of prison in a cleric’s garb. Franklin funded such ruses, often after the fact.
He also reimbursed sympathizers who helped the escapees get to France. Thomas Digges, a Maryland merchant living in London, frequently took in the fugitives—and frequently wrote Franklin for money. “I cannot describe to you the trouble I have with these people,” Digges declared. “And the expence is so heavy on me at times that even with my curtailed and economic mode of living I am put to extreme difficulties. It is not trifles that will do for men who come naked by dozens and half dozens, and it is harder still to turn one’s back upon them.”
Such was just how Franklin felt, and why he spent the time he did on relatively small numbers of people. Those who solicited his aid discovered he had a soft place in his heart for those in distress. When that distress involved matters of the heart, his own heart was softer still. A young captain named John Lock, who claimed to be an American, was taken from a British vessel by a French ship and imprisoned at Nantes. His fiancée, a fair young Frenchwoman, visited Passy and poured out her feelings. Franklin comforted her and promised to write to French naval minister Sartine. “By the letters that have passed between this Captain and the lady,” Franklin explained, “and by her earnestness in her solicitations, I perceive they are passionate lovers, and cannot but wish the obstacles to her union removed, and that there were a great many more matches made between the two nations, as I fancy they will agree better together in bed than they do in ships.”
In this case Franklin’s sympathies outran his judgment. The damsel’s lament was genuine—but woefully ill informed. Her lover was not an American after all, but British. This discrepancy grieved her less than it embarrassed Franklin; what upset her was the fact that her handsome captain was already married.
Franklin’s face reddened in another instance as well—but from anger more than embarrassment. Although Thomas Digges for a time did honest service on behalf of American escapees, that time terminated well before Franklin’s funding did. In 1781 Digges disappeared with £400 Franklin had forwarded for prisoner relief. Franklin could hardly contain himself.
He that robs the rich even of a single guinea is a villain; but what is he who can break his sacred trust by robbing a poor man and a prisoner of eighteen pence given charitably for his relief, and repeat that crime as often as there are weeks in a winter, and multiply it by robbing as many poor men every week as make up the number of 600? We have no name in our language for such atrocious wickedness. If such a fellow is not damned, it is not worth while to keep a Devil.
Franklin’s correspondence with David Hartley involved more than prisoner exchanges. A skeptic regarding the war, Hartley continued the pacifying efforts he had begun with Franklin in London in 1775. Hartley communicated confidentially with Lord North, who authorized Hartley to sound Franklin out. The terms offered were not insignificant, starting with what Hartley characterized—certainly with North’s approval—as “a tacit cession of independence to America.” For now the acknowledgment of independence must remain tacit; Parliament did have its pride. But the bridge from tacit to formal was plausible: a suspension of hostilities for a period of from five to seven years, during which time, presumably, minds as subtle as Franklin’s ought to be able to find the language to satisfy all parties. The one real hitch for the Americans was Britain’s insistence that they abandon their alliance with France.
Hartley made a compelling case for the plan. He quoted Franklin (circa 1775) back to Franklin: “A little time given for cooling might have excellent effects.” He pointed out that the proposal committed no one to anything permanent. Should the transition from tacit to formal independence fail, “We can but fight it out at last. War never comes too late.” Yet even then something would have been gained—namely, five years of peace. “Peace is a bonum in se, whereas the most favourable events of war are but relatively lesser evils.” Besides, he could not believe that war would resume once halted. “If the flames of war could be but once extinguished, does not the Atlantic Ocean contain cold water enough to prevent their bursting out again?”
Hartley acknowledged that America’s French connection complicated things. Yet Franklin ought to consider carefully the French interest in the affair. Doubtless the French did. “There is a certain point, to France, beyond which their work would fail and recoil upon themselves: If they were to drive the British ministry totally to abandon the American war, it would become totally a French war.” For now the French alliance might serve America, but not forever—and perhaps not to the point of American independence.
Hartley did not ask Franklin for any commitment, which he supposed Franklin was not, by himself, in any position to give. He asked only for some encouraging sign. And let it come soon. “Peace now is better than peace a twelve-month hence, at least by all the lives that may be lost in the mean while and by all the accumulated miseries that may intervene by that delay.”
Franklin refused to oblige. This was a better offer, because more authoritative, than the vague hints brought by Paul Wentworth a year earlier. The alliance with France was serving its purpose. Yet the offer was not good enough. Franklin assured Hartley that he remained as devoted to peace as ever. “But this is merely on motives of general humanity, to obviate the evils men devilishly inflict on men in time of war, and to lessen as much as possible the similarity of Earth and Hell.” Britain had brought the war upon itself by bringing it on America, and America was not going to abandon the fight on some indefinite promises. The war would continue “till England shall be reduced to that perfect impotence of mischief which alone can prevail with her to let other nations enjoy peace, liberty and safety.” With equal adamance Franklin rejected abandonment of the treaties
with France. America owed France a debt of gratitude and justice for taking America’s part in time of need. The American alliance with France reflected a general appreciation of this fact; for this reason the alliance would last. “Though it did not exist, an honest American would cut off his right hand rather than sign an agreement with England contrary to the spirit of it.”
Reconciliation had once been possible, but no longer. Reminding Hartley of the story of Roger Bacon’s mythical brazen head, which held the secret of building a wall around England to defend against invaders but was ignored till too late, Franklin declared that the British government was now in the same situation. “It might have erected a wall of brass round England if such a measure had been adopted when Friar Bacon’s brazen head cried out, ‘Time is!’ But the wisdom of it was not seen till after the fatal cry of ‘Time’s past!’”
Franklin’s defiant mood was easier to maintain in 1779 than it would be for some time thereafter. That spring Spain joined the war. Although the Congress failed to win an alliance, much money, or even recognition of American independence from the court of King Carlos, the fact that Britain now had another fleet to contend with buoyed American hopes.
But things began to go wrong again. Admiral d’Estaing grew tired of guarding General Clinton at New York and sailed away, whereupon Clinton escaped by sea for the American south, to exploit Loyalist sympathies there. He landed in the Carolinas at the beginning of 1780, laying siege to Charleston, the only real city of the entire region. In May, Charleston surrendered, along with an American army of 5,000 and four ships. Morale among the Americans in the neighborhood drooped badly; many availed themselves of Clinton’s offer of amnesty in exchange for allegiance to King George. In August, British General Cornwallis routed American troops at Camden, South Carolina, raising the prospect of unraveling the American confederation from the bottom up.
In September even worse news arrived from the north. One of the American heroes of the war had turned coat. Benedict Arnold felt ill treated by the Congress, which jumped several junior officers over him in promotion, and he felt betrayed by the alliance with France, which married America to a bunch of murdering papists (Arnold had fought in the French and Indian War, and although he rejected the rigid Puritanism of his Connecticut youth, he drew the line well short of Rome). He also felt short of cash, having married—after the death of his first wife, while he was fighting the British in 1775—the belle of Philadelphia society (the crowd into which Sarah Bache despaired of fitting without lace and feathers from Paris). Britain offered a remedy for his resentments and his debts, and in the summer of 1779 he began selling secrets to General Clinton. Included was vital information on troop movements and the operations of the French fleet. The following year he obtained command of West Point on the Hudson—“a post in which I can render the most essential services,” he informed John André, his British contact. Arnold offered to deliver West Point to Clinton, but the plot was discovered when André was captured with incriminating documents. Arnold fled downriver on a British warship, leaving André to the noose, and Mrs. Arnold, who apparently knew of his treachery and may have assisted in it, to fend for herself. At New York City he was greeted with congratulations and a commission as brigadier general in the British army.
The blow to the patriot cause was profound. “Arnold’s baseness and treachery is astonishing!” Franklin declared upon hearing the news.
Nor was that the end of the evil tidings. The winter of 1779–80 had been even worse than the trial at Valley Forge, provoking a springtime mutiny after six weeks of one-eighth rations. In the winter of 1780–81 the mutiny came in January—followed by another three weeks later, and yet another in May. Amid the distress, Franklin received letters from Lafayette and Washington lamenting the lack of basic necessities. “We are naked, shockingly naked, and worse off on that respect than we have ever been,” Lafayette wrote. “No cloth to be got. No money…. You have no idea of the shocking situation the Army is in.” The marquis implored Franklin—“for God’s sake, dear Friend”—to find something, anything, for his men to wear.
Washington was less emotional, but his words were the more ominous for that. “I doubt not you are so fully informed by Congress of our political and military state that it would be superfluous to trouble you with any thing relating to either,” he told Franklin—before continuing, “If I were to speak on topics of the kind it would be to shew that our present situation makes one of two things essential to us: a peace, or the most vigorous aid of our allies, particularly in the article of money.”
Peace or money—after nearly six years of war it had come to that. Washington was not the only one thinking peace; the Congress had appointed John Adams to pursue precisely the kind of cues Franklin had rejected from David Hartley. So far Adams had nothing to show for his efforts, but if the strains on the army continued to increase, he might be forced to find something.
Franklin, believing that a permanent peace would follow only upon a crushing British defeat, opted for the other horn of Washington’s dilemma. He appealed once more to Vergennes for money. Franklin had kept the French court apprised of the British overtures lest Louis learn to doubt America’s good faith, and also lest Louis forget that America had other suitors; now Franklin prefaced his appeal with a protestation of his country’s continued devotion to the common cause. Speaking for the Congress, he declared that it was “the unalterable resolution of the United States to maintain their liberties and independence, and inviolably to adhere to the alliance at every hazard and in every event.” Moreover, the misfortunes lately encountered by American arms, far from dampening American ardor, had redoubled it. This said, certain facts were undeniable. He cited the letter he had received from Lafayette about the troops’ want of clothing; he quoted Washington about needing either peace or money.
“I am grown old,” he explained to Vergennes. His gout had been plaguing him again; he could not say how long he would hold his current office. “I therefore take this occasion to express my opinion to your Excellency that the present conjuncture is critical; that there is some danger lest the Congress should lose its influence over the people if it is found unable to procure the aids that are wanted; and that the whole system of the new Government in America may thereby be shaken.” The next several months might determine the fate of America for generations. “If the English are suffered once to recover that country, such an opportunity of effectual separation as the present may not occur again in the course of ages.” And on the fate of America hung the fate of Europe. “The possession of those fertile and extensive regions and that vast sea coast will afford them [the British] so broad a basis for future greatness by the rapid growth of their commerce, and breed of seaman and soldier, as will enable them to become the terror of Europe, and to exercise with impunity that insolence which is so natural to their nation, and which will increase enormously with the increase of their power.”
Was this what France wanted? It was not what America wanted. But it was what America—and France—would get if French aid failed. “In the present conjuncture, we can rely on France alone.”
Franklin asked Vergennes for 25 million livres. He eventually received a promise of 6 million—and a lecture on the difficulty Louis himself was having raising money for France’s campaigns. Vergennes also hinted that France was considering a negotiated settlement.
It was a most trying period. While Louis pondered his latest plea for money, Franklin wrote to John Adams, then in Holland similarly trying to raise funds. Franklin said he had made his most forceful presentation to the French court, and could only wait. “I have, however, two of the Christian graces: faith and hope. But my faith is only that of which the Apostle speaks, the evidence of things not seen. For in truth I do not see at present how so many bills drawn at random on our ministers in France, Spain and Holland are to be paid, nor that any thing but omnipotent necessity can excuse the imprudence of it.” Franklin for one was willing to bow to that omnipotent necessity. “I think the bills drawn upon us by the Congress ought at all risques to be accepted.” He would use his best endeavors to scrape together funds to pay the bills as they came due. “And if those endeavours fail, I shall be ready to break, run away, or go to prison with you, as it shall please God.”
Franklin was half-joking; at his age he was in no position to break and run. Other days—when his gout, which had been gnawing his toes most of the winter, bit with particular energy—a half joke was more than he could manage. “I have passed my 75th year,” he wrote to the Congress, “and I find that the long and severe fit of the gout which I had the last winter has shaken me exceedingly, and I am yet far from having recovered the bodily strength I before enjoyed. I do not know that my mental faculties are impaired; perhaps I shall be the last to discover that. But I am sensible of a great diminution in my activity, a quality I think particularly necessary in your minister for this court. I am afraid therefore that your affairs may some time or other suffer by my deficiency.”
Since middle age he had maintained his health by summer vacations; but these he had not been able to take since the war started. Business barred other concessions to advancing years that might have made his existence more bearable.
His time had come. “I have been engaged in public affairs, and enjoyed public confidence in some shape or other during the long term of fifty years, an honour sufficient to satisfy any reasonable ambition, and I have no other left but that of repose, which I hope the Congress will grant me by sending some person to supply my place.”
Though his tone belied his words, Franklin disclaimed any doubt regarding the ultimate success of what he called “the glorious cause.” But he said the members of the Congress should not expect to see him soon after his replacement arrived. “As I cannot at present undergo the fatigues of a sea voyage, the last having been almost too much for me, and would not again expose myself to the hazard of capture and imprisonment in this time of war, I purpose to remain here at least till the peace, perhaps it may be for the remainder of my life.”
He asked one thing of the Congress beyond relief from his duties—one favor to which he thought his service entitled him.
It is that they will be pleased to take under their protection my grandson William Temple Franklin. I have educated him from his infancy, and brought him over with an intention of placing him where he might be qualified for the profession of the law. But the constant occasion I had for his service as a private secretary during the time of the commissioners, and more extensively since their departure, has induced me to keep him always with me.
Without the boy, he could not have managed his work as minister. But the lad had lost so much time in his law studies that he could never recover. Yet he had shown himself adept in foreign affairs, demonstrating sagacity and judgment, a facility in the French language, and a general knowledge of how a minister’s office ought to be conducted. One day he would make the Congress a fine minister. “In the mean time, if they shall think fit to employ him as a secretary to their minister at any European court, I am persuaded they will have reason to be satisfied with his conduct, and I shall be thankful for his appointment as a favour to me.”
Franklin’s gloom persisted into summer. In July 1781 he learned that the Congress had appointed Robert Morris superintendent of American finances. Franklin knew the successful merchant from Philadelphia; they had served together on the Pennsylvania Council of Safety, on the Secret Committee of the Continental Congress, and on the Committee of Secret Correspondence. It was fair to say that Morris had few secrets from Franklin, and these did not include the large profits Morris made—if not at the public expense, then at least from the public treasury. But Morris’s profits were no secret from anyone. “He has vast designs in the mercantile way,” John Adams remarked. “And no doubt pursues mercantile ends, which are always gain.” Yet, speaking of Morris’s service in the Congress, Adams added, “He is an excellent member of our body.” Morris himself acknowledged his intention to serve self and country at once. “I shall continue to discharge my duty faithfully to the public, and pursue my private fortune by all such honourable and fair means as the times will admit of.” Tom Paine attacked Morris in the press for growing fat at a time when Continental troops were growing gaunt. But in the desperation of the winter of 1780–81, Congress suppressed such scruples as some of its members had and handed American finances to Morris, appreciating that while the signature of the president of the Congress meant nothing to the money men, the signature of Morris meant a great deal.
Franklin greeted Morris’s appointment with pleasure. “From your intelligence, integrity, and abilities, there is reason to hope every advantage that the public can possibly receive from such an office,” he wrote Morris. Yet he warned Morris what he had got himself into—and in doing so transparently revealed an aspect of his own feelings about the nature of public service. “The business you have undertaken is of so complex a nature, and must engross so much of your time and attention as necessarily to injure your private interests; and the public is often niggardly, even of its thanks, while you are sure of being censured by malevolent critics and bug-writers, who will abuse you while you are serving them, and wound your character in nameless pamphlets, thereby resembling those little dirty stinking insects that attack us only in the dark, disturb our repose, molesting and wounding us while our sweat and blood are contributing to their subsistence.”
Morris indeed suffered the sort of abuse Franklin forecast, even as his efforts allowed Washington’s army to fight another season. This by itself was a victory, and in keeping with Washington’s overall strategy. Despite his continuing worries about money and mutinies, Washington’s aim was straightforward: to keep fighting. The longer the rebellion lasted, the less British taxpayers liked it. So far the North ministry had managed to quell the stirrings of revolt in Parliament; how much longer it would be able to do so was an open question.
As Parliament grew impatient, so did Britain’s commanders in America. British victories in the south were singly satisfying but added up to nothing. American irregulars prevented a consolidation of British control, leaving Clinton and Cornwallis to conclude that they had overrated the Crown’s popularity in that region. Cornwallis, commanding the south after Clinton’s return to New York, refused to spend the rest of his career in America. “I am quite tired of marching about the country in quest of adventure,” he wrote. “If we mean an offensive war in America, we must abandon New York, and bring our whole force into Virginia. We then have a stake to fight for, and a successful battle may give us America.”
With Clinton’s approval, Cornwallis headed north, daring Washington to come out and fight. For several weeks Washington declined the dare. The British general swept into Virginia, driving Lafayette from Richmond; but still Washington held back. Cornwallis scattered Steuben’s forces; Washington did not move. Cornwallis dispersed the Virginia legislature at Charlottesville, missing the capture of Governor Jefferson at Monticello by a mere ten minutes. Washington remained aloof.
Washington’s patience paid off, albeit in an unexpected direction. In August he received word that the long-awaited French fleet under Admiral de Grasse was coming—but not to New York. The French commander had departed the West Indies with twenty-nine warships and 3,000 troops and was bound for the Chesapeake. At once Washington changed plans. He decided to leave Clinton to the comforts of Manhattan, and finally to accept Cornwallis’s challenge. For the whole war Washington had fought an enemy who could take to the waves when backed to the beach; the presence of Grasse would erase that disadvantage. “The moment is critical,” Washington reported to Congress, “the opportunity precious, the prospects most happily favourable.”
Immediately he wrote Lafayette, who became as excited as Washington. “Should a French fleet now come in Hampton Roads,” Lafayette predicted, “the British army would, I think, be ours.” Washington ordered Lafayette to get south of Cornwallis and prevent at all costs his slipping back into Carolina.
Washington then began preparing his own troops for a dash south. A master of logistics and preparation, he personally mapped the march and tended to every imaginable matter of provisioning and transport. Clinton’s spies saw signs of motion in Washington’s camp, but the American general spread disinformation indicating that he was simply circling south to assault New York from Staten Island. He sent crews to repair roads and bridges on the Jersey banks of the Hudson. He even constructed a large oven to supply bread to the fictitious attackers. Not till too late did Clinton realize that the object of the preparations was not his army but Cornwallis’s.
By the time Washington passed through Philadelphia his destination was plain, but by then the cork was in the bottle. Grasse reached the mouth of the Chesapeake at the end of August, and although contrary winds and his own cautiousness prevented an attack on Cornwallis’s rear, the French presence precluded a British naval rescue of Cornwallis.
After the excitement of preparation and marching, the siege of Yorktown, where Cornwallis made his stand, went slowly. Washington wondered what his counterpart was thinking. “Lord Cornwallis’s conduct,” he remarked in the second week of October, “has hitherto been passive beyond conception. He either has not the means of defence, or he intends to reserve his strength until we approach very near him.”
The answer was a bit of both. By night Americans constructed emplacements within cannon shot of the British lines; by day the emplacements came under British fire—until they were completed and could return the fire, eventually silencing the British guns. The work was capriciously dangerous. A lieutenant colonel of the Virginia militia, St. George Tucker, recorded in his diary for October 6, “A man was killed by a cannon ball a day or two past without any visible wound. He was lying with his knapsack under his head which was knocked away by the ball, without touching his head.”
On the British side the situation was worse. Cornwallis went underground to escape the bombardment; others took their pounding at the surface. “An immense number of Negroes have died in the most miserable manner,” wrote Tucker, after interrogating a refugee from the siege. Desperate work with bayonets accompanied occasional assaults on British redoubts, but mostly the American and French artillery wore the defenders gradually down. American spirits rose accordingly. “Our shot and shell went over our heads in a continual blaze the whole night,” wrote an American soldier. “The sight was beautifully tremendous.” British spirits traced an inverse arc. “Our provisions are now nearly exhausted and our ammunition totally,” read the entry in one British officer’s journal for October 16.
Cornwallis was not the man to fight to the death, nor Virginia the place for him to do so. By October 17, when a hundred American and French guns maintained an unceasing barrage, he had had enough. The sheer noise made surrender difficult. Cornwallis put a drummer on the parapet to signal intent to parley, but no one on the American side could hear him. “He might have beat away till doomsday,” remarked an American officer. But the white handkerchief attracted attention, and the guns fell silent. The next day the surrender was formalized.
It was exactly four years since the other great American victory of the war, at Saratoga. Heaven itself seemed to endorse the end of the fighting. St. George Tucker described the hours after the surrender:
A solemn stillness prevailed. The night was remarkably clear and the sky decorated with ten thousand stars. Numberless meteors gleaming through the atmosphere afforded a pleasing resemblance to the bombs which had exhibited a noble firework the night before, but happily divested of all their horror.
The next day the British troops marched out of the fortress. For nearly two miles American troops lined one side of the road, French troops the other. The British band played “Welcome, Brother Debtor” and other tunes, including “When the King Enjoys His Own Again.” With a different set of words, the latter was called “The World Turned Upside Down,” and it was by this title that Americans remembered it.