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“My God! All is over,” moaned Lord North on hearing the news. Whether he meant the war or his ministry was not immediately clear; before long any distinction was moot. Even as King George prayed heaven “to guide me so to act that posterity may not lay the downfall of this once respectable empire at my door,” the opposition in Parliament was preparing to lay it at North’s. America was not the only issue causing complaints against the ministry, but it was the one the complainers could coalesce about. When a motion for abandonment of the American cause came within one vote of passage, North took this as his cue to resign after twelve years in office. Conventional wisdom was that “Lord North’s war” would follow him off the stage.
It did, but not without effort—much of it Franklin’s. The final phase of the conflict took him by surprise. “I wish most heartily with you that this cursed war was at an end,” Franklin wrote to one of the British friends with whom he still corresponded, just before news of Yorktown arrived. “But I despair of seeing it finished in my time. Your thirsty nation has not yet drank enough of our blood.”
It was with something less than despair, but hardly happiness, that Franklin learned he would have responsibility for bringing the war to an end. The Congress refused his request to retire, instead appointing him to a commission to negotiate a peace. He accepted the appointment from a sense of duty. “I have never known a peace made, even the most advantageous,” he told John Adams, one of his fellow peace commissioners, “that was not censured as inadequate, and the makers condemned as injudicious or corrupt. Blessed are the peace makers is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world, for in this they are frequently cursed. Being as yet rather too much attached to this world, I had therefore no ambition to be concerned in fabricating this peace.” All the same, he assured Adams, he deemed it an honor to serve with him in so important a business, and would work to the best of his ability.
The Congress named three peace commissioners besides Franklin and Adams. Thomas Jefferson never joined the group, remaining in America. Henry Laurens was an equally unhelpful choice, having been captured by the British on the Atlantic and currently residing in the Tower of London. John Jay was the fifth member; he, Franklin, and Adams did the bulk of the work.
For the first several months, however, Franklin was the only one of the three in Paris, where the serious talking took place. Adams was in Holland—which had entered the war against Britain, but refused alliance with the United States—trying to pry some guilders out of the Dutch burghers. (Holland’s profit-minded approach to diplomacy moved Franklin to remark, “Some writer, I forget who, says that Holland is no longer a nation but a great shop; and I begin to think it has no other principles or sentiments but those of a shopkeeper.”) John Jay was in Madrid having comparable bad luck with the Spanish, who likewise had declared war on Britain but likewise spurned the Americans. (Franklin urged Jay to hold firm against Spain’s efforts to take advantage of America’s distress, especially regarding the Mississippi. “Poor as we are,” he said, “yet as I know we shall be rich, I would rather agree with them to buy at a great price the whole of their right on the Mississippi than sell a drop of its waters. A neighbour might as well ask me to sell my street door.”)
The instructions from the Congress to the peace commissioners stipulated two nonnegotiable conditions: acknowledgment of America’s independence and the continuation of the treaty with France. The rest was left to the discretion of the commissioners. At the time the instructions were drafted—June 1781—Americans could hardly hope for more. But the victory at Yorktown improved America’s prospects, and Franklin intended to exercise his discretion to the utmost.
Yet even as Washington reinforced Franklin’s bargaining position, Arthur Lee sapped it. Lee had not wanted Franklin to have anything to do with peace talks, and contended that his appointment as commissioner came only “by the absolute order of France”—as communicated by the French minister in Philadelphia, the Chevalier de la Luzerne. “At this very time, Congress had the fullest evidence and conviction that Dr. Franklin was both a dishonest and incapable man,” Lee asserted. Several members of the Congress had registered concern at the terms of Franklin’s commission, with its instruction to cling to France. “He, good man,” Lee continued sarcastically, “felt no qualms at such a commission, no sense of dishonour or injury to his country. On the contrary, he expressed the utmost alacrity in accepting it, and I believe most cordially, since it puts him in the way of receiving money, which is the God of his idolatry.” As to what this meant for America, “The yoke is riveted upon us…. The French therefore are to make peace for us.”
Lee’s libels were an extreme version of a sentiment widely shared: that Franklin was unduly partial to France. John Adams thought so. As an early anti-British radical, Adams was hardly an apologist for Britain. “They hate us, universally from the Throne to the footstool,” he said, “and would annihilate us, if in their power.” Yet Adams was equally skeptical of the French. In Adams’s worldview, nations had no friends, only interests. French interests had motivated the alliance with America; French interests—rather than any attachment to republican values, for instance—would continue to motivate French policy after the war. And American interests dictated creating a certain distance from France now that the war was nearly over. Adams’s skepticism was no secret. “He tells me himself,” Franklin reported to Congress, “that America has been too free in expressions of gratitude to France; that she is more obliged to us than we to her; and that we should shew spirit in our applications.”
John Jay felt similarly. He believed that Vergennes was deliberately delaying the negotiations, from a desire to extend American dependence on France. “It was evident the Count did not wish to see our independence acknowledged by Britain until they had made all their uses of us,” Jay told Robert Livingston, the American foreign secretary, after an interview with Vergennes. Jay saw no reason to share his insight with the French. “We ought not to let France know that we have such ideas; while they think us free from suspicion they will be more open, and we should make no other use of this discovery than to put us on our guard.”
Franklin had long since stopped answering criticism directed at his person, and he probably would have let the allegations of Francophilia pass had they not threatened what he considered to be essential American interests. “Your enemies industriously publish that your age and indolence have unabled you for your station,” Robert Morris wrote; “that a sense of obligation to France seals your lips when you should ask their aid; and that (whatever your friends may say to the contrary) both your connections and influence at Court are extremely feeble.” Morris said he related this information as a friend, but he added that many in Congress believed the allegations. Moreover, those who censured Franklin were the ones most vocal in their censure of France.
Franklin responded that he was “extremely sorry” to hear the railing against France, as it tended to hurt “the good understanding” that had existed between the governments of France and the United States. “There seems to be a party with you that wish to destroy it. If they could succeed, they would do us irreparable injury.” The help of France had been crucial to America’s success at arms, and it remained crucial to America’s success at diplomacy. “It is our firm connection with France that gives us weight with England, and respect throughout Europe. If we were to break our faith with this nation, on whatever pretence, England would again trample on us, and every other nation despise us.” Franklin acknowledged the prudence of allowing the British to hope for a reconciliation with their former colonies, but America’s polestar must be Paris. “The true political interest of America consists in observing and fulfilling, with the greatest exactitude, the engagements of our alliance with France.”
The negotiations began in earnest with the arrival of Richard Oswald in France in April 1782. Oswald was the representative of the new ministry in London, which was headed by Lord Rockingham and included Charles James Fox as foreign minister and Lord Shelburne as secretary of state for home and colonial affairs. Oswald impressed all who knew him with his honesty and fair-mindedness. Henry Laurens— writing from his London cell—called him “a gentleman of the strictest candour and integrity.” Vergennes asserted, “He is a wise man who seems not to have even the idea of intrigues. Rich himself, devoid of ambition, he has yielded to his friendship for Lord Shelburne in coming here, and he does not claim other recompense than the glory of rendering a useful service to his homeland and to humanity.”
Franklin was initially more guarded in his judgment. He granted that Oswald appeared “wise and honest,” but he questioned the purpose of his mission. The fact that Oswald proposed to talk to him alone—apart from Vergennes—indicated a desire to separate America from France. Such a separation Franklin refused to allow. “I let him know that America would not treat but in concert with France,” Franklin recorded in his journal of the negotiations.
Oswald did not dispute this. But he would never have received his present appointment had he been so easily dissuaded. “I told the Doctor I made no doubt that was the case,” Oswald wrote. “Yet I could not see but it was in the power of the commissioners of the colonies, by meeting and consulting together, to smooth the way to an equitable settlement of general negotiation, by framing some particular points separately regarding Great Britain.” This would be no more than an efficient use of time.
There was more, however. Oswald suggested that once the issue of American independence was settled, reconciliation between the two branches of the English-speaking people could take place quickly; it ought not be delayed by issues concerning only the French. Britain had its pride, and if the French confused British weariness for war in America with unwillingness to defend British interests against French encroachment, they would rue their error—and so would the Americans, if they tied themselves to France. “In case France should make demands too humiliating for England to submit to, the spirit of the nation would be roused, unanimity would prevail, and resources would not be wanting.”
Franklin begged to differ. The issue of independence was already settled, he said. It had never been in question in American minds since 1776; and if Britain was slow to acknowledge the obvious, that was the problem of the king and Parliament. Britain said it desired reconciliation. “It is a sweet word.” But it meant more than mere peace and required more than a termination of hostilities. For six years Britain had waged a cruel and unjust war upon America; not surprisingly, Americans harbored a great deal of resentment against Britain. Would his countrymen demand reparation for property destroyed by British troops? For homes and villages burned by Britain’s Indian allies? Franklin did not presume to say. “But would it not be better for England to offer it? Nothing would have a greater tendency to conciliate, and much of the future commerce and returning intercourse between the two countries may depend on the reconciliation. Would not the advantage of reconciliation by such means be greater than the expence?”
What might be fair reparation? Franklin answered his own query: Canada. Britain could hardly get more from Canada in furs and other items of export than it cost her to defend and govern the province. Americans could make far better use of it. Franklin appreciated that Britain might not wish to give up Canada at the insistence of the United States; he acknowledged the role pride played in human affairs. But why not offer Canada without being asked, as a token of Britain’s sincerity regarding reconciliation? Such an offer would have “an excellent effect” in America. It would settle the issue of reparations—and at the same time provide, through Canadian land sales, the means by which the Loyalists might be indemnified for loss of their estates.
If Oswald was surprised at the audacity of Franklin’s opening offer, he diplomatically cloaked his feelings. He congratulated Franklin on the forthrightness of his statement, and the two agreed that Oswald ought to relay the message personally to Shelburne in London. Franklin had written out his position in advance; Oswald, explaining that his own paraphrase could not do justice to Franklin’s own wording, asked to take Franklin’s paper with him. He assured the author it would be returned safely. Franklin, though reminding Oswald that the American commission comprised others besides himself, and that these would have to be consulted before any decisions could be made, at length agreed.
Franklin’s initial skepticism of Oswald had vanished. “We parted exceeding good friends,” he recorded. To Shelburne he declared, “I desire no other channel of communication between us than that of Mr. Oswald, which I think your Lordship has chosen with much judgment.” Franklin hoped that the secretary of state, replying through Oswald, would be as frank and serious as he himself had tried to be. “If he is enabled, when he returns hither, to communicate more fully your Lordship’s mind on the principal points to be settled, I think it may contribute much to the blessed work our hearts are engaged in.”
Blessed the work may have been, but complicated. Oswald returned in the first week of May with the news that Shelburne had read Franklin’s proposal with real interest. Oswald relayed that Shelburne had evinced surprise that a reparation was even under consideration, and he wondered if the Americans were going to demand it. Franklin, of course, had not said they would; and now Oswald tried to ensure that they would not. Speaking confidentially, he said—and subsequently repeated—that he thought the question of Canada would be settled to the Americans’ satisfaction at the end of the negotiations. But if they brought it up at the beginning it might snarl the talks irreparably.
Franklin was not sure what to make of this. Was Oswald speaking for Shelburne or simply for himself? “On the whole,” he wrote in his journal, “I was able to draw so little from Mr. Oswald on the sentiments of Lord Shelburne, who had mentioned him as entrusted with the communication of them, that I could not but wonder at his being sent again to me.”
Franklin’s wonder increased upon the arrival of a second envoy. The new man was young—only twenty-seven—and just recently elected to Parliament. But he was obviously well connected, for he was the son of Franklin’s nemesis, George Grenville. And he was well tutored, in that his instructions from Charles Fox indicated precisely how he was to conduct himself. Thomas Grenville was to determine whether the diplomatic distance between Franklin and Vergennes remained as small as it appeared to Oswald, and to do everything in his power to increase it. In secret instructions to young Grenville, Fox explained:
After having seen Mons. de Vergennes you will go to Dr. Franklin, to whom you will hold the same language as to the former, and as far as his country is concerned there can be no difficulty in shewing him that there is no longer any subject of dispute and that if unhappily this treaty should break off his countrymen will be engaged in a war in which they can have no interest whatever either immediate or remote. It will be very material that, during your stay at Paris, and in the various opportunities you may have of conversing with this gentleman, you should endeavour to discover whether, if the treaty should break off or be found impracticable on account of points in which America has no concern, there may not in that case be a prospect of a separate peace between G. Britain and America, which after such an event must be so evidently for the mutual interests of both countries.
Grenville’s first efforts in this direction failed. Franklin ushered him to a meeting with Vergennes; when Grenville proposed that Britain formally acknowledge American independence in exchange for a return to the territorial status quo ante bellum, Vergennes smiled. The offer of independence amounted to nothing, he said. “America does not ask it of you. There is Mr. Franklin; he will answer you as to that point.”
Franklin obliged. “We do not consider ourselves as under any necessity of bargaining for a thing that is our own,” he said, “which we have bought at the expense of much blood and treasure, and which we are in the possession of.”
Britain would have to do better, Vergennes continued. And as for a return to the status quo, had Britain been thus contented after the last war? That war had started over minor disputes regarding the Ohio and Nova Scotia; it ended with Britain taking Canada, Louisiana, and Florida, not to mention her gains in the East Indies. A country that gambled on war, Vergennes suggested, must accept its losses.
Grenville answered that France had provoked the present war by encouraging the Americans to revolt. “On which the Count de Vergennes grew a little warm,” Franklin recorded, “and declared, firmly, that the breach was made, and our independence declared, long before we received the least encouragement from France; and he defied the world to give the smallest proof of the contrary. ‘There sits,’ said he, ‘Mr. Franklin, who knows the fact, and can contradict me if I do not speak the truth.’”
This was cleverly worded. Vergennes did not ask Franklin to vouch for his statement with a positive assertion, which would have required Franklin to lie. In fact France had encouraged the American revolt, secretly supplying money long before the Declaration of Independence. Franklin, as a member of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, knew this perfectly well. Vergennes, as the moving spirit behind the money, knew he knew. Grenville may have known too, from British spies in America or France. On the other hand, as young and new to the game as Grenville was, he may not have known it. In any event, he did not call Vergennes’s bluff.
Vergennes suspected there must be more to Grenville’s mission than this initial unacceptable offer. France had entered the war not simply for America’s sake; it expected to regain some of what it had lost the last time out. And, having done so, it was not about to give those gains back. Surely Grenville—and his superiors—realized this. Noting Grenville’s antecedents, Vergennes wrote to the French ambassador in Spain, “He belongs to an important family which is connected by interest with the present ministry, and it is not very likely that the latter would intend him for a role so dull and so little analogous to his birth and his condition as that of coming to amuse and delude us.”
Amusing, deluding, or otherwise, Grenville pursued Franklin back to Passy. Following Fox’s instructions, he pointed out that America had accomplished its goal of independence, and he contended that America therefore had no reason to continue fighting. For the Americans to cling too closely to France would be to risk reopening the war for reasons that had nothing to do with American interests.
Franklin replied with a small lecture on debt and gratitude.
A, a stranger to B, sees him about to be imprisoned for a debt by a merciless creditor. He lends him the sum necessary to preserve his liberty. B then becomes the debtor of A and, after some time, repays the money. Has he then discharged the obligation? No. He has discharged the money debt, but the obligation remains, and he is a debtor for the kindness of A, in lending him the sum so seasonably. If B should afterwards find A in the same circumstances that he, B, had been in when A lent him the money, he may then discharge this obligation or debt of kindness, in part, by lending him an equal sum. In part, and not wholly, because when A lent B the money there had been no prior benefit received to induce him to it. And therefore if A should a second time need the same assistance, B, if in his power, is in duty bound to afford it to him.
Grenville rejoined that Americans would carry gratitude very far to apply this personal calculus to politics among nations. France, he pointed out, was the party that benefited by America’s separation from Britain, as that separation materially weakened Britain and comparatively strengthened France.
Franklin responded that he was so strongly impressed by the kind assistance France afforded America in her time of trial, and by the generous and noble manner in which it was given, without the French exacting a single privilege in return, that he never entertained reasons to lessen the American obligation to France. He added that he did not doubt that his countrymen were all of the same sentiment.
“Thus he gained nothing of the point he came to push,” Franklin recorded of Grenville. “We parted, however, in good humour.”
In many respects the peace negotations resembled a game of chess, a pastime of which Franklin was famously fond. The tale of his chess match with a friend in Madame Brillon’s bathroom, which went on for hours while she watched from her tub, was a favorite around Paris. (Later tellings often elided that French tubs in those days had wooden covers, which shielded the bather’s body from view.) His penchant for bending the rules when occasion indicated—as with the Duchess of Bourbon—was esteemed a charming foible. When one opponent, a Frenchman, checked his king, Franklin illegally ignored the check and moved another piece. Called on the violation, Franklin declared, “I see he is in check, but I shall not defend him. If he was a good king, like yours, he would deserve the protection of his subjects; but he is a tyrant and has cost them already more than he is worth. Take him, if you please. I can do without him, and will fight out the rest of the battle en républicain.”
On another occasion he and one of the abbés who lived with Madame Helvétius were playing a game far into the night when the last candle sputtered down. The abbé assumed that the game would end. “My dear abbé,” said Franklin, “it is impossible for two men such as us to stop merely because of lack of light.” The abbé recalled where some candles were stored, and proposed to fetch them, even in the dark. “Go, then,” Franklin encouraged, “and may the goddess of the night protect you in your adventurous course.” In the abbé’s absence, even as the candle flickered its last, Franklin rearranged the pieces to guarantee himself the victory. The abbé returned with the candles, lit one, and registered dismay at his hopeless position. Franklin chuckled and said, “The goddess of night has just answered my prayers and has sent one of Mercury’s agents here to aid me while you were gone.”
Franklin added to his chess lore with a written reflection on the subject. The Morals of Chess, printed on his Passy press, was more serious than some of the other bagatelles, but hardly ponderous. “Life is a kind of chess,” he explained, “in which we have often points to gain, and competitors and adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and evil events that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it.” In playing chess a person could learn foresight. “If I move this piece, what will be the advantages of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me?” Likewise circumspection, “which surveys the whole chessboard, or scene of action, the relations of the several pieces and situations, the dangers they are respectively exposed to.” Also caution, in that once a piece was touched, that piece must be moved, and once a piece was set down, there it must stand. “If you have incautiously put yourself into a bad and dangerous position, you cannot obtain your enemy’s leave to withdraw your troops and place them more securely; but you must abide all the consequences of your rashness.”
Players must exercise good sportsmanship. “You must not, when you have gained a victory, use any triumphing or insulting expression, nor show too much pleasure; but endeavour to console your adversary, and make him less dissatisfied with himself by every kind and civil expression.” Finally, players must remember that the best victory was not over the opponent but over oneself. A player might point out where the other slipped and graciously suggest a more effective move. “You may indeed happen to lose the game to your opponent, but you will win what is better: his esteem, his respect, and his affection, together with the silent approbation and good will of impartial spectators.”
British negotiators in France certainly saw this essay. How Richard Oswald and Thomas Grenville interpreted it is hard to know. Was the army of Cornwallis a chess piece placed rashly and the British government the player that had to abide the consequences of the rashness? Who was the victor to whom magnanimity in triumph was recommended? Whose esteem was being sought? Franklin left them to guess.
British officials saw much more from Franklin’s pen than his bagetelles. As a civil conflict the Revolutionary War was fertile soil for secret agents. The differences of language and culture that typically separate countries at war did not exist; patriots and loyalists looked alike, sounded alike, dressed alike. And—despite the nomenclature applied to the opposing parties—questions of patriotism and loyalty were often clouded. A Frenchman selling secrets to England during the Seven years’ War, for example, could be expected to have to wrestle harder with his conscience than an American cleaving to King George during the Revolutionary War. There is no evidence, and little reason to believe, that William Franklin’s conscience was any less clear than his father’s.
The elder Franklin was a prime target for British espionage. As minister to France he was the hinge of the alliance upon which the conflict turned; as peace commissioner (especially until the arrival of John Adams and John Jay) he was the person who knew, or would determine, how far America could be pushed at the peace table. It would pay the British government greatly to learn this vital information.
And the British government in turn would pay to acquire this information. London found its man in Edward Bancroft. Nearly forty years Franklin’s junior, Bancroft had been born in humble circumstances in Westfield, Massachusetts. When the boy was two his father died, in a pigsty of an epileptic seizure. His stepfather owned a tavern in which young Edward grew up; such schooling as he received was largely makeshift and self-administered. (Significantly, part of the formal portion came at the tutelage of Silas Deane.) Bancroft taught himself chemistry; his aptitude for the science was revealed in a path-breaking book on the chemistry of color and in a patent that promised to ruin the market for Carolina indigo. He also apprenticed to a doctor, eventually becoming a charter member of the Medical Society of London. Meanwhile he found time to sojourn in South America, a journey that provided the material for a natural history of Guiana and its peoples.
Bancroft’s travels terminated, for the time being, in London, where, as a bright and inquisitive American transplant, he fell in with Franklin, who took to him at once. Franklin recommended Bancroft to the editor of the Monthly Review, in which Bancroft reported on American politics. Franklin introduced Bancroft to friends Pringle, Priestley, and others. Franklin successfully sponsored Bancroft for election to the Royal Society. Franklin even brought Bancroft in on the scheme to win a charter for the colony on the Ohio. Bancroft was present at Franklin’s inquisition in the Cockpit and was one of the few persons who defended Franklin in the London papers in the matter of the Hutchinson letters.
This last activity may have been what cemented Franklin’s friendship for Bancroft and inclined him to trust Bancroft with sensitive information regarding American affairs. When the Committee of Secret Correspondence appointed Silas Deane its agent in Europe, Franklin drafted instructions directing Deane to Bancroft. “From him you may obtain a good deal of information of what is now going forward in England,” Franklin wrote, cautioning Deane to be as circumspect as Franklin was sure Bancroft would be.
Bancroft was circumspect, all right, but not in the manner Franklin anticipated. Bancroft was one of that middling group that saw little to choose between the colonies and the mother country in their escalating quarrel, and when the quarrel became a war he determined that whichever side won, he would too. Perhaps it was his association with Deane that alerted him to the prospect of profiting from the war; perhaps the provincial in the great city simply developed expensive tastes. But in either case, even while he was furnishing information to Deane—and after Franklin and Lee joined Deane in France, to the three commissioners together—about affairs in England, he supplied intelligence to the British ministry about the doings of the American commissioners. He later claimed that the role of the double agent was “as repugnant to my feelings as it had been to my original intentions,” but the stipends he received from both sides evidently assuaged his distaste. The British paid better, for while Franklin supplied him only a secretary’s salary, the British added a premium for the risk he was running; he ultimately received £1,000 per annum, with a promise of a permanent pension of £500.
In a postwar memorandum to the British government, Bancroft described his activities.
I went to Paris, and during the first year, resided in the same house with Dr. Franklin, Mr. Deane etc., and regularly informed this Government of every transaction of the American Commissioners; of every step and vessel taken to supply the revolted colonies with artillery, arms etc.; of every part of their intercourse with the French and other European courts; of the powers and instructions given by Congress to the Commissioners; and of their correspondence with the Secret Committees etc.
When the Franco-American treaties were signed, Bancroft sped the news to London. When Admiral d’Estaing left Toulon with the French fleet, bound for America, London learned through Bancroft. After Yorktown, as Franklin and the other American peace commissioners devised strategy for dealing with the French and the British, the attentive Bancroft sent back reports that supplemented those of Oswald and Grenville.
Bancroft delivered his information by various means. Because Franklin and the other Americans thought he was spying for them, they did not begrudge his frequent visits to England, where he communicated directly with government officials. While in Paris he sometimes met with Paul Wentworth, Franklin’s interlocutor and Britain’s European spymaster. On other occasions he left messages in a sealed bottle secreted in the hollow of a tree on the south side of the Tuileries.
The British were pleased with Bancroft’s work. They raised his stipend; as the peace negotiations neared a close, one of Bancroft’s British handlers called him “a valuable treasure to government” both as a source of intelligence regarding the Americans and as an indirect and unacknowledged means of influencing the American negotiating position.
For this reason the British ignored the fact that Bancroft had a third employer he served at least as diligently as he did the Americans and the British: himself. The value of various issues on the London stock exchange rose and fell, often sharply, on news from the battle front. Bancroft was uniquely placed to anticipate such news, and he used it to his advantage. Learning early of the travails of Burgoyne in the forests of New York in the autumn of 1777, he wrote to a speculator friend who evidently bet on a drastic drop in share prices, which duly followed. Although Bancroft did not volunteer information about his profits, Wentworth noted he had grown suddenly rich.
Arthur Lee suspected Bancroft of disloyalty to the American cause, but Franklin did not (perhaps partly because the paranoid Lee did). Franklin blithely confided in Bancroft information that doubtless damaged the American cause. Yet the damage could not have been especially great, for Franklin adopted a characteristic attitude regarding the possibility of espionage. Early in his stay at Paris he received a letter from an Englishwoman once resident in Philadelphia, now living in France. She apparently shared his politics, for she warned him against those who did not. “You are surrounded with Spies, who watch your every movement, who you visit, and by whom you are visited,” she wrote. “Of the latter there are who pretend to be friends to the cause of your country but that is a mere pretence.” She said her own security prevented her from being more explicit. “But of the truth of what I inform you, you may strictly rely.”
Franklin responded diplomatically—and philosophically—to her advice.
As it is impossible to discover in every case the falsity of pretended friends who would know our affairs; and more so to prevent being watched by spies, when interested people may think proper to place them for that purpose, I have long observed one rule which prevents any inconveniences from such practices.
It is simply this: to be concerned in no affairs that I should blush to have made public, and to do nothing but what spies may see and welcome. When a man’s actions are just and honourable, the more they are known, the more his reputation is increased and established. If I was sure, therefore, that my valet de place was a spy, as he probably is, I think I should probably not discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him.
Franklin remarked elsewhere that when rascals proliferated, honest men might prosper. “If the rascals knew the advantage of virtue, they would become honest men out of rascality.” For himself, speaking the truth served admirably. “That is my only cunning.”
Although Bancroft was an inadvertent link to London, others were deliberate. Even during the worst of the war Franklin had not severed all ties to England. He exchanged letters, of course, with David Hartley regarding prisoners and peace prospects. He communicated occasionally with William Strahan—a communication strained by the political rift that separated these erstwhile intimate friends.
In 1781 Franklin resumed a correspondence with Edmund Burke that had been briefly interrupted. Burke wrote in this instance on behalf of his friend General Burgoyne, who had been paroled to England after Saratoga but subsequently had his parole revoked. The general was liable to be returned to America. Burke did not deny that Burgoyne had prosecuted the war vigorously and capably. But in doing so, he said, the general had simply been following the king’s directives and the soldier’s code. Acknowledging the irregular character of his request, Burke nonetheless asked that Franklin intercede. “If I were not fully persuaded of your liberal and manly way of thinking,” he wrote, “I should not presume, in the hostile situation in which I stand, to make an application to you. But in this piece of experimental philosophy, I run no risque of offending you. I apply, not to the Ambassador of America, but to Doctor Franklin the Philosopher; my friend; and the lover of his species.”
Franklin answered in like tone. “Since the foolish part of mankind will make wars from time to time with each other, not having sense enough otherwise to settle their differences, it certainly becomes the wiser part, who cannot prevent those wars, to alleviate as much as possible the calamities attending them.” As it happened, Franklin had just received authorization from the Congress to offer Burgoyne’s freedom in exchange for that of Henry Laurens. Lacking formal relations with the appropriate ministers in London, Franklin forwarded the offer to Burke. “If you can find any means of negotiating this business, I am sure the restoring another worthy man to his family and friends will be an addition to your pleasure.”
Unfortunately for Burgoyne—and Laurens—the ministry in London was not ready for the swap. “Difficulties remain,” Burke replied in February 1782. But the growing Parliamentary opposition to the war gave Burke, a leader of that opposition, hope that the prisoner issue might soon become moot. “I trust it will lead to a speedy peace between the two branches of the English nation, perhaps to a general peace; and that our happiness may be an introduction to that of the world at large.”
Other Franklin connections to England were unrelated to the war. Benjamin Vaughan was a young admirer and casual acquaintance; in 1779 he published in London a collection of Franklin’s works. On the title page he violated British usage, if not British law, in identifying Franklin as the minister at the court of Paris of “the United States of America.” Vaughan lamented England’s folly in letting Franklin—and America—slip away. “Can Englishmen read these things [that is, Franklin’s works], and not sigh at recollecting that the country which could produce their author was once without controversy their own!”
Franklin kept loose touch with the Royal Society. He sent the group an occasional paper and read their transactions. In the summer of 1782 he took time from the peace negotiations to reply to a letter from the president of the society. “Be assured that I long earnestly for a return of those peaceful times when I could sit down in sweet society with my English philosophical friends,” Franklin wrote. The memory of those days filled him with delight. “Much more happy should I be thus employed in your most desirable company than in that of all the grandees of the earth projecting plans of mischief, however necessary they may be supposed for obtaining greater good.” In this letter Franklin allowed himself a fond hope. “If proper means are used to produce, not only a peace, but what is much more interesting, a thorough reconciliation, a few years may heal the wounds that have been made in our happiness, and produce a degree of prosperity of which at present we can hardly form a conception.”
Franklin’s sentiments were not always so elevated. His press at Passy may have produced humorous and moral essays, but it also produced propaganda, occasionally of the most virulent and scurrilous sort. In the spring of 1782 Franklin began circulating a “Supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle.” Complete with local notices and advertisements, the publication carried readers straight to the streets of the Massachusetts capital.
But what really got their attention was a letter from Albany, written by a captain of militia named Gerrish. The alert officer related his interception of a shipment from the Seneca Indians to the British governor of Canada. “The possession of this booty first gave us pleasure,” Gerrish wrote, “but we were struck with horror to find among the packages 8 large ones, containing SCALPS of our unhappy country-folks.” There were hundreds of the grisly items, inventoried in a bizarre missive from the chief of the Senecas to the Canadian governor (helpfully transcribed by a British trader).
No. 1. Containing 43 scalps of Congress soldiers, killed in different skirmishes…. Also 62 of farmers killed in their houses … a black circle all around to denote their being killed in the night….
No. 2. Containing 98 of farmers killed in their houses … great white circle and sun to show they were surprised in the daytime, a little red foot to show they stood upon their defence and died fighting for their lives and families.
No. 3. Containing 97 of farmers … killed in their fields….
No. 4. Containing 102 of farmers … 18 marked with a little yellow flame to denote their being of prisoners burnt alive, after being scalped, their nails pulled out by the roots, and other torments….
No. 5. Containing 88 scalps of women, hair long … 17 others very grey … knocked down dead or had their brains beat out.
No. 6. Containing 193 boys’ scalps, of various ages … bullet-marks, knife, hatchet or club, as their deaths happened.
No. 7. 211 girls’ scalps, big and little….
No. 8. This package is a mixture of all the varieties above-mentioned, to the number of 122…. 29 little infants’ scalps of various sizes … ripped out of their mothers’ bellies.
As if this all were not shocking enough, the Seneca chief urged the governor to forward the tribute to London. “We wish you to send these scalps over the water to the great king, that he may regard them and be refreshed; and that he may see our faithfulness in destroying his enemies and be convinced that his presents have not been made to ungrateful people.”
The whole business was absolutely appalling—and utterly false. There was no such shipment, and no such message for King George.
Yet Franklin, the author of the hoax, defended it as grounded in the reality of the warfare the Indians waged at Britain’s behest. “The form may perhaps not be genuine,” he admitted to a French friend, to whom he sent copies for distribution. “But the substance is truth; the number of people of all kinds and ages murdered by them being known to exceed that of the invoice. Make any use of them you may think proper to shame your Anglomanes, but do not let it be known through what hands they come.”
Franklin’s propaganda may have changed a few minds but, coming this late in a long war, probably not many. It certainly did not change the positions of his counterparts in the peace negotiations.
Such a change required a substantive shift in the balance of military power—which, as matters transpired, took place in the spring of 1782. Following the allied victory at Yorktown, one who made it possible, the formerly cautious but now overconfident Grasse, sailed south to the West Indies, where he suffered a devastating defeat. In the Battle of the Saintes the admiral himself was captured, and the British gained what Charles Fox called, without excessive braggadocio, “the most important and decisive victory that has happened during the war.”
Meanwhile, the Spanish effort to recapture Gibraltar stalled. Spain had entered the war hoping to win various prizes from the British, but the one that obsessed the Spanish was the monolith that guarded the passage from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Though ownership of the great rock had strategic implications, to Spain it was mostly a matter of pride. Unfortunately, Spanish pride had availed little so far against British cannons and the tunnels that shielded them.
In the summer of 1782 the Spanish mounted what promised to be their final offensive—however it turned out. Novel floating batteries were built to carry Spanish guns to sea; Spanish ships were massed in support. John Adams wrote from Holland that the Spanish ambassador there “trembled for the news we should have from Gibraltar.” Well he might have, Adams thought, saying he himself had “no expectation at all” of a Spanish victory. “The earnest zeal of Spain to obtain that impenetrable Rock, what has it not cost the House of Bourbon this war? And what is the importance of it? A mere point of honour! A trophy of insolence to England and of humiliation to Spain!”
Adams’s apprehensions proved out; the attack failed. This left France in an awkward position. Louis had promised to fight on Spain’s side till the British were evicted from Gibraltar, yet on current trends that might take years—or generations. How long must France wait for this quixotic quest to succeed?
Vergennes had to consider something else. The Americans were tied to France directly, by the Franco-American treaty, but they were tied to Spain indirectly, by the Franco-Spanish treaty. There was no love lost between Spain and America, and if Vergennes clung to Spain too closely too long, the Americans might cut themselves loose of France—Franklin’s protestations of friendship to the contrary notwithstanding.
A final factor complicated things further. Russia had sat out the war, more or less, behind the protection of its “league of armed neutrality.” While Britain and France fought each other, Catherine the Great prepared to gobble up the Crimea. Vergennes, knowing the czarina’s appetite, earnestly desired to keep her from this next meal. But doing so required the cooperation of the British. Needless to say, as long as Britain and France were fighting in the Atlantic, cooperation in the Black Sea would be problematic.
In short, by the autumn of 1782 Vergennes had concluded that time was no longer on France’s side. Within limits, the sooner the present war drew to an end, the better.
As the shape of these events came into view, Vergennes shifted his position on the idea of separate negotiations. With feigned magnanimity he told Franklin the French court was resisting British efforts to deal with the Americans through France. “They want to treat with us for you, but this the king will not agree to. He thinks it not consistent with the dignity of your state. You will treat for yourselves; and every one of the powers at war with England will make its own treaty. All that is necessary for our common security is that the treaties go hand in hand, and are signed on the same day.”
The British, perhaps alerted by Bancroft, responded at once to the new state of affairs. Richard Oswald, with what seemed to Franklin “an air of great simplicity and honesty,” explained the dire financial straits into which Britain had fallen during the present war. “Our enemies may now do what they please with us,” he confided. “They have the ball at their foot.” Only Franklin, as representative of America, could extricate England from its predicament. Indeed, Oswald said, it was perhaps the case that no single man ever possessed the power to do so much good as Franklin possessed at this moment.
Oswald assured Franklin that Shelburne shared this view, and showed him a letter from Shelburne saying as much. Oswald went on to say that he—Oswald—had told the ministers in London that however much they might seek Dr. Franklin’s assistance, they must not ask him to do anything unsuitable to his character or inconsistent with his duty to his country. “I did not ask him the particular occasion of his saying this,” Franklin recorded, “but thought it looked a little as if something inconsistent with my duty had been talked of or proposed.”
That something Franklin inferred from a memorandum Oswald showed him, written by Shelburne and mentioning “a final settlement of things between Great Britain and America, which Dr. Franklin very properly says requires to be treated in a very different manner from the peace between Great Britain and France, who have always been at enmity with each other.” In other words, a separate peace with the Americans was at the top of London’s list.
Franklin did not reject the British overture, but neither did he accept it at face value. Nor did he conceal it from Vergennes. The two diplomats discussed Britain’s efforts to drive them apart, and agreed on the prudence of their keeping together. Franklin—either from an honest suspicion of Britain’s bona fides or from a desire to assure Vergennes of America’s good faith—suggested that the British strategy of peacemaking might conceal a desire to conclude treaties with all parties, the better to isolate one to make war on after the treaties were signed. Egregiously exceeding his instructions, Franklin recommended that the four countries at war with Britain ought to enter into a new treaty, pledging all to the defense of each in the event of just such an English subterfuge. Vergennes concurred, noncommittally.
Following this nod to allied solidarity, Franklin pressed toward a settlement with Britain. He took pains to ensure that the British government acknowledge the independence of the United States prior to the commencement of formal negotiations, lest London try to count this as a concession compelling something of similar weight from the Americans. On this point Franklin demonstrated an ability to split hairs with the sharpest bargainers.
In early July he got down to particulars. He supplied Oswald with two lists. The first comprised matters he described as “necessary” to a peace treaty; the second, elements “advisable.” Heading the necessary list was independence—“full and complete in every sense.” An immediate corollary of independence was the evacuation of all British troops from American soil. Next was a definitive determination of the boundaries of the American states and of the British colonies of Canada. Related to this was the retreat of the boundaries of Canada to what they had been before the Quebec Act of 1774. Finally, Britain must recognize the rights of Americans to fish on the banks off Newfoundland, as they had for centuries. Franklin explained that these items were nonnegotiable, and he spent little time discussing them.
The advisable list—“such as he would as a friend recommend to be offered by England,” was how Oswald paraphrased Franklin to Shelburne—required greater explanation. It started with a reparation payment to Americans ruined by the burning of towns and the destruction of farms. Franklin suggested £500,000 or £600,000 as a reasonable figure. “I was struck at this,” Oswald recorded, and he indicated as much to Franklin. Franklin answered that it sounded like a large sum but in fact would be money well spent. “It would conciliate the resentment of a multitude of poor sufferers who could have no other remedy, and who without some relief would keep up a spirit of secret revenge and animosity for a long time to come against Great Britain.”
Second of the advisables was a public acknowledgment by Britain of its error in distressing America so. “A few words of that kind would do more good than people could imagine,” Franklin said.
Third was a free-trade compact between Britain and America. American ships should have the same privileges in British ports as British ships; British ships should trade in American ports as equals with American ships.
Fourth and finally, Britain should cede Canada to the United States. In British hands Canada would become the bone of contention in Anglo-American relations it had long been in Anglo-French relations. Better to bar such quarrels by transferring Canada to the United States at once.
It was not lost on Oswald that Franklin’s position here was firmer than it had been in April. At that time Franklin had been vague on the boundaries of Canada and suggested using proceeds from the sale of Canadian land to compensate the Loyalists. Now he was adamant that Canada did not stretch south of the Great Lakes—which meant, in effect, that the western boundary of the United States must be the Mississippi River. And he offered nothing to the Loyalists beyond a vague statement that the commissioners might recommend recompense to the separate states.
Oswald delivered Franklin’s terms to Shelburne, who, following the unexpected death by influenza of Rockingham, was suddenly prime minister. (The same influenza gripped John Jay, recently arrived in Paris from Spain but now incapacitated by illness.) Shelburne therefore spoke with enhanced authority when he indicated general acceptance of Franklin’s necessary terms. If the Americans could be persuaded to drop Franklin’s advisable articles, Shelburne said, the treaty might be “speedily concluded.”
In fact it was concluded, for the most part on Franklin’s necessary terms, but not as speedily as Shelburne or Franklin hoped. John Jay recovered sufficiently to register suspicion that things were moving too quickly (why were the British suddenly so accommodating?). Jay insisted on stronger guarantees of American independence in the language of Oswald’s commission. Without informing Franklin he sent an envoy to London to insist on a new commission, which Shelburne, still eager to move the talks along, granted.
Jay was no more trusting of the French. “This Court chooses to postpone an acknowledgment of our independence by Britain, to the conclusion of a general peace,” he wrote Congress president Robert Livingston, “in order to keep us under their direction until not only their and our objects are attained, but also until Spain shall be gratified in her demands.” Candor compelled him to a further comment: “I ought to add that Doctor Franklin does not see the conduct of this Court in the light I do, and that he believes they mean nothing in their proceedings but what is friendly, fair and honourable.”
Franklin was disinclined to argue the matter. The same lifestyle that had given him gout now inflicted a kidney stone that bloodied his urine and made travel, even from Passy to Versailles, most painful. For several weeks Jay took the lead in the negotiations; Franklin, persuaded that nothing important was at stake in Jay’s bustling about, gave the younger man his head.
The arrival of John Adams from Holland at the end of October complicated matters further. Whether Adams was more distrustful of France or of Franklin was hard to say; to him they seemed the same. By contrast, Jay seemed to Adams to be exhibiting a salutary “firmness and independence” toward France. “Between two as subtle spirits as any in this world, the one malicious [Franklin], the other I think honest [Jay], I shall have a delicate, a nice, a critical part to act,” Adams told his diary. “Franklin’s cunning will be to divide us. To this end he will provoke, he will insinuate, he will intrigue, he will maneuvre.” Adams did not hide his preference for Jay over Franklin. After a conversation with Franklin, he recorded, “I told him without reserve my opinion of the policy of this Court, and of the principles, wisdom and firmness with which Mr. Jay had conducted the negotiation in his [Franklin’s] sickness and my absence, and that I was determined to support Mr. Jay to the utmost of my power in the pursuit of the same system.”
If Adams expected a fight, Franklin disappointed him. Having received the approval of Vergennes himself to talk separately with the British, he declined to dispute with Jay and Adams when they proposed to do just that, despite instructions from the Congress to the contrary. More to the point, he understood how close the principal parties were to a settlement. After a long war, if there would be quibbling, he would leave it to his fellow commissioners.
The quibbling lasted a month. At the end of November the Americans and British reached a settlement both sides could accept. It included all of Franklin’s necessary conditions, as well as a guarantee of American navigational rights on the Mississippi. (Whether Spain would honor the guarantee where the river cut through Spanish territory remained unanswered.) In exchange the Americans agreed to recognize debts owed British merchants from before the war and to recommend to the states fair treatment of the Loyalists.
The settlement was only preliminary, not to take effect without a general settlement among all the warring parties. But that was merely a matter of time. For the United States the Paris pact marked an eminently satisfactory outcome to a conflict that had often threatened to end in disaster. The independence of the United States was now recognized by the world; American territory reached from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. In other words, America’s present was safe and its future assured.
Best of all, the bloodshed and destruction were over. This prospect, more than anything else, was what inclined Franklin not to argue for the last advantage from either Britain or France. He could congratulate himself and his fellow commissioners for what they had accomplished at Paris, and he could applaud his fellow Americans for what they had won on the battlefield. But he remained utterly unconvinced of the efficacy of war as a general endeavor. If anything, the conflict just concluding reinforced his opposite feeling. Some months earlier he had received a letter from his old friend Jonathan Shipley hoping that the peace talks might soon bear fruit. Franklin seconded the hope, coining a motto that would forever be associated with his name. “After much occasion to consider the folly and mischiefs of a state of warfare,” Franklin wrote, “and the little or no advantage obtained even by those nations who have conducted it with the most success, I have been apt to think that there has never been, nor ever will be, any such thing as a good war, or a bad peace.”