27
In March 1783 Franklin wrote Shipley again. By this time the other belligerents had called an armistice, and Franklin looked forward to a definitive conclusion to the conflict between Shipley’s country and his.
Let us now forgive and forget. Let each country seek its advancement in its own internal advantages of arts and agriculture, not in retarding or preventing the prosperity of the other. America will, with God’s blessing, become a great and happy country; and England, if she has at length gained wisdom, will have gained something more valuable, and more essential to her prosperity, than all she has lost.
Yet Franklin doubted England really had learned anything from the war. Her “great disease,” he said, was the large number and emoluments of her political offices; her downfall the “avarice and passion” these aroused in her public officials. “They hurry men headlong into factions and contentions, destructive of all good government.” As long as riches attached to office, Britain would suffer. “Your Parliament will be a stormy sea, and your public councils confounded by private interests.”
For Franklin the essence of the American Revolution was not simply self-rule for the former colonies, necessary though that was. The essence of the Revolution was the triumph of virtue over vice. In the years before the Revolution he had watched corruption permeate British politics; on that fateful morning in the Cockpit he had felt corruption’s foul breath. He knew himself to be the most reluctant of revolutionaries, an ardent Briton driven from the arms of the mother country only by a deep, personal disillusionment. Others of the Revolutionary generation subscribed to the notion of America’s peculiar virtue, but for few did it have the personal meaning it had for Franklin, because few had been so disillusioned.
The emotional counterpart to Franklin’s disillusionment with Britain was his investment of hope in America. For Franklin the Revolution had to be about more than self-rule, for self-rule was, at bottom, simply another form of office-seeking. On the other hand, if the Revolution was about virtue, and the application of virtue to politics, then the struggle became transcendent. “Our Revolution is an important event for the advantage of mankind in general,” he wrote his English friend Richard Price. Mankind already showed evidence of following the American lead. The summer of 1783 brought murmurings of anti-British rebellion in Ireland; Franklin credited “the contemplation of our successful struggle” as a central element in the resistance. He went on to reflect with satisfaction “that liberty, which some years since appeared in danger of extinction, is now regaining the ground she had lost; that arbitrary governments are likely to become more mild and reasonable, and to expire by degrees.”
The patriot in Franklin might have been willing to accept American virtue on its face, but the philosopher demanded explanation. Franklin knew Americans—and Britons—well enough to recognize that on human merits there was little to distinguish the one people from the other. After chiding William Strahan for Britain’s faults, he declared, “My dear friend, do not imagine that I am vain enough to ascribe our success to any superiority in any of these points.” So what did account for the American victory, if not the virtue of Americans? The virtue of that for which Americans fought. “If it had not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent interposition of Providence, in which we had faith, we must have been ruined.” With half a smile, one imagines, Franklin suggested that it was enough to drive a man to religion. “If I had ever before been an atheist, I should now have been convinced of the being and government of a Deity!”
Franklin’s interpretation of the Revolution as the victory of virtue made him worry at news that American virtue might be slipping. Robert Morris wrote of difficulty getting the states to pay their shares of national obligations. “The remissness of our people in paying taxes is highly blamable,” Franklin replied; “the unwillingness to pay them is still more so.” Franklin knew what the victory had cost in terms of American commitments, not least because he had been the one making most of those commitments. He hated to see Americans trying to disavow them. When tax resisters justified their opposition on grounds that the government was taking money out of their pockets, he countered that they were fundamentally mistaken. “Money, justly due from the people, is their creditors’ money, and no longer the money of the people, who, if they withhold it, should be compelled to pay.”
For one subsequently cited as an apostle of capitalist virtues, Franklin took a strikingly socialistic view of property. “All property, indeed, except the savage’s temporary cabin, his bow, his match-coat, and other little acquisitions absolutely necessary for his subsistence, seems to me to be the creature of public convention,” he wrote. Laws and customs made accumulation of property possible; the public therefore had the right to regulate the quantity and use of property. “All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition.” Needless to say, this was hardly a universal opinion among a people who had fought a war over taxes. But Franklin was unmoved. “He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages.”
When Samuel Cooper wrote from Boston that the Massachusetts legislature had consented to pay up, Franklin replied with congratulations—and scorn for those states that remained in arrears. The latter put Franklin in mind of the improvident Quaker who pleaded poverty in not repaying the principal on a debt and conscience in not paying interest. His creditor damned him for a rogue, saying, “You tell me it is against your principle to pay interest, and it being against your interest to pay the principal, I perceive you do not intend to pay me either one or t’other.”
Virtue in paying America’s debts would have tangible benefits; a failure of virtue would exact material costs. In May 1784, following the final ratification of the peace treaty, Franklin wrote Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress, that “the great and hazardous enterprise we have been engaged in is, God be praised, happily completed, an event I hardly expected I should live to see.” Though the war had been hard, peace would quickly restore the country—assuming Americans kept their faith. If they failed in this regard, the vultures of the world, starting with the British, would be waiting. “If we do not convince the world that we are a nation to be depended on for fidelity in treaties, if we appear negligent in paying our debts, and ungrateful to those who have served and befriended us, our reputation, and all the strength it is capable of procuring, will be lost, and fresh attacks upon us will be encouraged.”
An obvious and easy form of virtue was frugality. Beneficial in itself, it would help Americans pay their debts and redeem their foreign promises. In his letter to Thomson, Franklin warned against America’s being “enervated and impoverished by luxury,” and he lauded frugality as practical patriotism.
This was an old argument from Franklin. At seventy-eight years of age, he might have been thought to have little new to say on the subject. Yet such was his subtlety and flexibility of mind, and such his skepticism even of his own long-held opinions, that in the middle of speaking for frugality he was willing to find virtue in its opposite. Benjamin Vaughan, his English editor, had inquired if Franklin knew a remedy for the American penchant for luxury, on which Vaughan had heard travelers remark disapprovingly. Franklin replied that he knew of no such remedy, then added that the problem was much exaggerated, and in any event might not be a problem at all. “Is not the hope of being one day able to purchase and enjoy luxuries a great spur to labour and industry? May not luxury, therefore, produce more than it consumes?” Even the clearest cases of squandering resources might not be so clear after all. “A vain, silly fellow builds a fine house, furnishes it richly, lives in it expensively, and in a few years ruins himself. But the masons, carpenters, smiths and other honest tradesmen have been by his employ assisted in maintaining and raising their families; the farmer has been paid for his labour and encouraged; and the estate is now in better hands.”
Franklin told a story from his own experience to illustrate the point. Decades ago the skipper of a Cape May shallop had done Franklin and Deborah a favor for which he refused payment. Deborah knew he had a daughter, and bought a cap for the girl. Three years later the captain, accompanied by a farmer friend, visited the Franklins. The captain said his daughter liked her cap very much. “But it proved a dear cap to our congregation,” he added.
“How so?” inquired Franklin.
“When my daughter appeared with it at meeting, it was so much admired that all the girls resolved to get such caps from Philadelphia; and my wife and I computed that the whole could not have cost less than a hundred pounds.”
The farmer broke in. “But you do not tell all the story. I think the cap was nevertheless an advantage to us, for it was the first thing that put our girls upon knitting worsted mittens for sale at Philadelphia, that they might have wherewithal to buy caps and ribbons. And you know that industry has continued, and is likely to continue and increase to a much greater value, and answer better purposes.”
To which Franklin added, in his letter to Vaughan, “Upon the whole, I was more reconciled to this little piece of luxury, since not only the girls were made happier by having fine caps, but the Philadelphians by the supply of warm mittens.”
Speculation on economics complemented Franklin’s musings on other matters. For a decade his political and diplomatic labors had largely kept him from philosophy, but the conclusion of the peace talks allowed a return to his true intellectual passion. In 1784 he sent a paper to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, entitled “Meteorological Imaginations and Conjectures,” which showed that his ability to reason from everyday observation to important insight about the natural world had not diminished. “There seems to be a region high in the air over all countries, where it is always winter, where frost exists continually,” he wrote. The evidence? Hail, which fell even during the warmest months and occasionally acquired impressive dimensions. “How immensely cold must be the original particle of hail which forms the future hailstone, since it is capable of communicating sufficient cold, if I may so speak, to freeze all the mass of vapour condensed round it, and form a lump of perhaps six or eight ounces in weight!”
The winter of 1783–84 had been the coldest in many years. Franklin linked it to a “dry fog” that had been observed throughout the Northern Hemisphere the previous summer—which, he conjectured, was no fog at all but smoke from the Hecla volcano in Iceland, spread by the prevailing winds. Whatever its source, this persistent pall had diminished the solar energy reaching the earth, to such a degree that when concentrated by a burning (or magnifying) glass, the sun’s rays that summer scarcely kindled brown paper. The surface of the earth consequently never acquired the heat that typically moderates winter weather, Franklin explained; hence the bitter season that followed.
This surprisingly modern account of the weather was followed by an even more ambitious explanation of phenomena physicists would still be puzzling over two centuries later. “Universal space, as far as we know of it, seems to be filled with a subtle fluid, whose motion, or vibration, is called light,” Franklin wrote in a letter read to the American Philosophical Society. The vibrations of light—sunlight, for example—heated objects on which the light fell by causing the particles of those objects to vibrate in turn. Franklin used the word “fire” to denote a combination of electromagnetic, kinetic, and chemical energy—a combination about which he was rather vague (and, in fact, confused). He was not sure whether this “fire” was something material or immaterial (although in this he unknowingly anticipated the Einsteinian equivalence of mass and energy). But he hit on a fundamental law of conservation of mass-energy. “Thus, if fire be an original element, or kind of matter, its quantity is fixed and permanent in the world. We cannot destroy any part of it, or make addition to it; we can only separate it from that which confines it, and so set it at liberty, as when we put wood in a situation to be burnt; or transfer it from one solid to another, as when we make lime by burning stone, a part of the fire dislodged from the wood being left in the stone.”
As always he mixed practical matters with the theoretical. Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur, the author (under the pseudonym J. Hector St. John) of the Letters from an American Farmer, wrote for advice on the establishment of a packet service between France and America.
Franklin offered suggestions on the number of vessels necessary to maintain monthly service (five: four in regular service, one for backup), and on design. He had read of Chinese boats whose interiors were divided into separate watertight sections, and he urged Crèvecoeur to construct his boats similarly. “In which case if a leak should happen in one apartment, that only would be affected by it, and the others would be free; so that the ship would not be so subject as others to founder and sink at sea. This being known would be a great encouragement to passengers.” With his letter he enclosed a map of the Atlantic Ocean showing the Gulf Stream as charted by himself and others.
In a concession to advancing age Franklin had taken to using two sets of eyeglasses, one for close work, the other to see things at a distance. This was never convenient, but Franklin found it particularly irksome in traveling, when he would shift his gaze from a book or paper he was reading to a distant object he wished to observe. After considering the matter for some time, he directed his optician to take one pair of each of his spectacles and cut the lenses in half horizontally. Two each of these half-lenses were then fitted together in a single set of wire frames, with the farsighted halves on top and the nearsighted on the bottom. “By this means,” he explained, “as I wear my spectacles constantly, I have only to move my eyes up or down, as I want to see distinctly far or near, the proper glasses being always ready.” The invention brought an unexpected bonus. “This I find more particularly convenient since my being in France, the glasses that serve me best at table to see what I eat, not being the best to see the faces of those on the other side of the table who speak to me; and when one’s ears are not well accustomed to the sounds of a language, a sight of the movements in the features of him that speaks helps to explain; so that I understand French better by the help of my spectacles.”
What Franklin called his “double spectacles” (others would call them “bifocals”) assisted his observation of the most celebrated invention of the last two decades of the eighteenth century. For millennia men and women had watched clouds waft across the sky, many wondering what held those mountains of vapor aloft. In the early 1780s the Montgolfier brothers, sons of the famous papermaker Peter Montgolfier of Annonay, attempted to duplicate nature’s feat by capturing a cloud in a light bag, which was then carried aloft. Their cloud consisted not of water vapor but of smoke from burning straw, yet it served the purpose, carrying the brothers’ paper bag high into the air. Tickled, they graduated to larger bags, or balloons, sewn of linen or silk impregnated with a sealant, and experimented with other forms of lift, including “inflammable air,” or hydrogen.
Ballooning became an overnight sensation. The summer of 1783 saw numerous variants of the basic concept; these drew large crowds in Paris. Franklin recorded an August launch.
Not less than five thousand people were assembled to see the experiment, the Champ de Mars being surrounded by multitudes, and vast numbers on the opposite side of the river. At five o’clock notice was given to the spectators, by the firing of two cannon, that the cord was about to be cut. And presently the globe was seen to rise, and that as fast as a body of twelve feet diameter, with a force of only thirty-nine pounds, could be supposed to move the resisting air out of its way. There was some wind, but not very strong. A little rain had wet it, so that it shone and made an agreeable appearance. It diminished in apparent magnitude as it rose, till it entered the clouds, when it seemed to me scarce bigger than an orange, and soon after became invisible, the clouds concealing it.
The crowd went home well pleased; the balloon eventually landed in a field outside a village whose inhabitants, uninformed of the science involved, mistook the luminous globe for a monster and attacked it with stones, scythes and knives, rending it irreparably.
Weeks later another balloon went up from Versailles. Hot air lifted this one; suspended beneath the sack was a basket holding a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The unwitting aeronauts survived their flight in fine health (a wing wound to the rooster was attributed to a prelaunch kick from the sheep).
If animals could fly, so could humans. On December 1 Franklin joined thousands of others to witness the momentous event. As he recorded:
All Paris was out, either about the Tuileries, on the quays and bridges, in the fields, the streets, at the windows, or on the tops of houses, besides the inhabitants of all the towns and villages of the environs. Never before was a philosophical experiment so magnificently attended.
Some guns were fired to give notice that the departure of the great balloon was near, and a small one was discharged, which went to an amazing height, there being but little wind to make it deviate from its perpendicular course, and at length sight of it was lost.
Means were used, I am told, to prevent the great balloon’s rising so high as might endanger its bursting. Several bags of sand were taken on board before the cord that held it down was cut, and the whole weight being then too much to be lifted, such a quantity was discharged as to permit its rising slowly….
Between one and two o’clock, all eyes were gratified with seeing it rise majestically from among the trees, and ascend gradually above the buildings, a most beautiful spectacle. When it was about two hundred feet high, the brave adventurers held out and waved a little white pennant, on both sides their car, to salute the spectators, who returned loud claps of applause….
When it arrived at its height, which I suppose might be three or four hundred toises [fathoms], it appeared to have only horizontal motion. I had a pocket-glass, with which I followed it, till I lost sight, first of the men, then of the car, and when I last saw the balloon, it appeared no bigger than a walnut.
The commencement of flight carried humanity into what Franklin predicted would be “a new epoch.” Public expectations were readily raised—and as easily dashed. A Dutch admirer of Franklin, Jan Ingenhousz, wrote for specifics, with a mind toward launching balloons himself. Franklin included a warning with the information. “It is a serious thing to draw out from their affairs all the inhabitants of a great city and its environs, and a disappointment makes them angry. At Bordeaux lately a person pretended to send up a balloon, and received money from many people, but not being able to make it rise, the populace were so exasperated that they pulled down his house and had like to have killed him.” (Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Bache, now thirteen and on leave from studies in Switzerland, recorded something similar in Paris after a balloon caught fire and failed to ascend. “The people were furious and threw themselves upon the balloon, and tore it in pieces, each one carrying off a sample, some large enough to make a mattress; and I believe the authors would have been subjected to the same fate if they had not been escorted by a detachment of French guards.”) When skeptics derided the new invention as a mere toy, of no practical use, Franklin uttered a mot that quickly circulated throughout Europe. What good was a balloon? demanded one critic. “What good is a newborn baby?” Franklin replied.
As one recently responsible for making war and peace, Franklin was intrigued by the possibility that balloons might become instruments of the former—and thereby of the latter. Seventeen decades before the development of the theory of nuclear deterrence, Franklin identified its essence in the discovery of balloon flight. “Convincing sovereigns of the folly of wars may perhaps be one effect …” he wrote, “since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions. Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line, and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?”
Even more amazing than flying was “animal magnetism.” Franklin was indirectly responsible for this strangest enthusiasm of pre-revolutionary Paris, somewhat to his chagrin. Its principal author, Friedrich Anton Mesmer, had studied medicine at Vienna during the period when Franklin’s electrical experiments were becoming known on the European continent. Like many of Franklin’s readers from the Poor Richard days, Mesmer believed in astrology; having learned from Franklin how lighting carried celestial energy to earth, he easily concluded that electricity provided an invisible but pervasive fluid that linked the stars to human lives. Unfortunately for both his scientific theory and his medical practice, electricity was unpleasant to patients, sometimes violently so. But Mesmer was resourceful, and substituting magnetism for electricity as the invisible transmitter, he developed a flourishing practice stroking patients with magnets. In time he dispensed with the magnets, relying simply on his own powers of persuasion to release the therapeutic effects of “animal magnetism.”
Mesmer arrived in Paris about a year after Franklin did, and to the dismay of the medical establishment he quickly cultivated a large and devoted following. The king’s brother, the queen, and such other notables as Lafayette flocked to his group-therapy sessions, which featured hypnosis, apparitions, and messages from beyond the horizon of the quotidian world; typically the groups dissolved into mass hysteria, to the shrieking delight of all present. Wealthy older women and attractive younger ones were particularly susceptible to the spells of the handsome Austrian—a fact not lost on their husbands and fathers.
Mesmer’s success infuriated the French medical establishment, which denied him a license and sought means to banish him. The government stayed out of the doctors’ spat until Mesmer created a joint stock company to promote his teachings, and raised a subscription of more than 300,000 livres. This moved the animal magnetism debate from the court of science to that of fraud.
In March 1784 King Louis appointed a committee of the Paris faculty of medicine to investigate; the distinguished members included Joseph Ignace Guillotin, who would add a word to several languages by his advocacy of the use of a swift and thereby comparatively humane decapitation machine. The doctors decided they needed help from the Academy of Sciences, whereupon Louis added five members, including the great chemist Lavoisier—who would meet his end at the device endorsed by Dr. Guillotin—and the eminent American, Dr. Franklin.
Franklin had met Mesmer before, in the company of Madame Brillon. Mesmer employed Franklin’s armonica for background music during his séances, and Franklin naturally took an interest. He and Madame Brillon quickly determined that though Mesmer knew little about electricity or magnetism, he played the armonica passably. In her response to one of Franklin’s descriptions of an afterlife in which he and she would consummate their love, Madame Brillon remarked, “In heaven, M. Mesmer will content himself with playing the armonica and will not bother us with his electrical fluid!”
Franklin did not altogether deny the efficacy of Mesmer’s techniques, though he questioned the Austrian’s explanation. The human body was a marvelous mechanism, Franklin told a person who had asked his opinion of Mesmer, and all the more marvelous for being connected to the human mind.
There being so many disorders which cure themselves, and such a disposition in mankind to deceive themselves and one another on these occasions, and living long having given me frequent opportunity of seeing certain remedies cried up as curing every thing, and yet soon after totally laid aside as useless, I cannot but fear that the expectation of great advantage from this new method of treating diseases will prove a delusion.
That delusion may, however, and in some cases, be of use while it lasts. There are in every great rich city a number of persons who are never in health, because they are fond of medicines and always taking them, whereby they derange the natural functions and hurt their constitutions. If these people can be persuaded to forbear their drugs in expectation of being cured by only the physician’s finger or an iron rod pointing at them, they may possibly find good effects, though they mistake the cause.
The royal investigation commenced in the spring of 1784. It was complicated by Mesmer’s refusal to participate. He left the demonstration of his techniques to a disciple, Dr. Charles Deslon, but cleverly distanced himself from Deslon, saying the doctor had borrowed his ideas yet lacked a full understanding of them. In other words, if the commission believed Deslon, he—Mesmer—would be vindicated; if Deslon fell, Mesmerism would still stand.
Franklin’s kidney stone prevented his leaving Passy, so Deslon and the commission came to him. The Mesmeric cure was applied to several patients with maladies ranging from asthma to tumors. The results were ambiguous at best. In one of the more dramatic moments of the experiment, Deslon purportedly magnetized an apricot tree in Franklin’s garden. A blindfolded twelve-year-old boy was then led to four un-magnetized trees, which he embraced, one after the other, to determine the magnetism they contained. At the first tree he sweated and coughed. At the second he said he felt dizzy and his head hurt. At the third his head hurt more and he reported feeling the magnetism growing (although he was in fact moving farther from the test tree). At the fourth tree he fainted, which terminated the experiment.
Franklin and the commissioners filed their report, with his name heading the list of signatures. A public version was hurried into print, and twenty thousand copies were snatched up. The report declared the claims of animal magnetism unproven; such mitigation of symptoms as appeared were due to the customary causes of self-delusion and ordinary remission.
A second version of the report was read to the Academy of Sciences but otherwise kept confidential. It addressed the moral—which was to say, sexual—dangers to women of the Mesmer approach. “Touch them in one point, and you touch them everywhere,” it noted suggestively and most disapprovingly. By all means, the practice of animal magnetism must be discouraged.
The Franklin report did just that. A contemporary engraving showed Franklin and his colleagues delivering a copy of their report; the document radiated a magnetic force of its own that overturned Mesmer’s apparatus, to the discomfiture of his patients, including one half-dressed and blindfolded woman. Mesmer and Deslon were shown fleeing the scene, the former on a broomstick, the latter on a winged donkey.
Yet Franklin was not so sure what he and the commission had accomplished. “The report is published and makes a great deal of talk,” he wrote Temple. “Every body agrees it is well written, but many wonder at the force of imagination described in it, as occasioning convulsions &c., and some fear that consequences may be drawn from it by infidels to weaken our faith in some of the miracles of the New Testament…. Some think it will put an end to Mesmerism. But there is a wonderful deal of credulity in the world, and deceptions as absurd have supported themselves for ages.”
Franklin preferred philosophy, but diplomacy insisted. As ranking American minister in Europe, he carried the burden of counseling emigrants to the new nation on what to expect. And a burden it was. “I am pestered continually,” he wrote Charles Thomson, “with numbers of letters from people in different parts of Europe who would go to settle in America but who manifest very extravagant expectations, such as I can by no means encourage, and who appear otherwise to be very improper persons.” To save himself trouble Franklin composed and printed a pamphlet entitled Information to Those Who Would Remove to America. The pamphlet’s nominal purpose was to correct common misconceptions about America; it also served as a confession by Franklin as to what America stood for.
First among the misconceptions was that Americans were rich but ignorant, able, and willing to shower wealth upon Europeans with the slightest ingenuity. Second was the belief that with so many new governments and so few families of standing, the thirteen states must have hundreds of offices available to well-born Europeans willing to cross the water. Third was the notion that the new governments bestowed land gratis on strangers, complete with livestock, tools, and slaves. “These are all wild imaginings,” Franklin declared, “and those who go to America with expectations founded upon them will surely find themselves disappointed.”
What was the reality? “Though there are in that country few people so miserable as the poor of Europe, there are also very few that in Europe would be called rich. It is rather a happy mediocrity that prevails.” Americans were far from ignorant; their country supported nine colleges or universities and numerous academies. The several states did employ many people, but those employed often served at personal sacrifice. “It is a rule established in some of the states that no office should be so profitable as to make it desirable.”
Birth counted for next to nothing in America. “People do not enquire, concerning a stranger, What is he? But What can he do? If he has any useful art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him; but a mere man of quality, who on that account wants to live upon the public by some office or salary, will be despised and disregarded.” This practical outlook colored every aspect of American life. “The people have a saying, that God Almighty is himself a mechanic, the greatest in the universe; and he is respected more for the variety, ingenuity and utility of his handiworks than for the antiquity of his family.”
The only encouragement offered to strangers was what derived from liberty and good laws. Who came without a fortune must work to eat. “America is the land of labour, and by no means what the English call Lubberland, and the French Pays de Cocagne,where the streets are said to be paved with half-peck loaves, the houses tiled with pancakes, and where the fowls fly about already roasted, crying, Come eat me!”
Who, then, should travel to America? “Hearty young labouring men, who understand the husbandry of corn and cattle…. Artisans of all the necessary and useful kinds…. Persons of moderate fortunes and capitals, who having a number of children to provide for, are desirous of bringing them up to industry.” Such people would find opportunities for material improvement unequaled in Europe.
They would find something else as well. America was a land where virtue grew among the corn. “Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of the morals and virtue of a nation. Hence bad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be a comfortable consideration to parents.” Comforting too was the encouragement American liberty and tolerance afforded to real religion. “Atheism is unknown there, infidelity rare and secret, so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an atheist or an infidel. And the Divine Being seems to have manifested his approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness with which the different sects treat each other, by the remarkable prosperity with which he has been pleased to favour the whole country.”
Loose ends remained from the war. They entangled Franklin, who was still trying to resign, and they threatened to entangle the United States. The peace treaty had not even been initialed when Vergennes complained that the Americans had deceived and disappointed him. Yes, he had accepted that they might negotiate with the English separately from France, but he had no idea they would actually conclude a separate settlement. “I am rather at a loss, sir, to explain your conduct,” the self-possessed foreign minister declared to Franklin, in what for him amounted to outrage. “You have concluded your preliminary articles without informing us, although the instructions of Congress stipulate that you do nothing without the participation of the King.” Appealing to Franklin’s personal honor, Vergennes complimented even as he complained. “You are wise and discreet, sir; you understand the proprieties; you have fulfilled your duties all your life. Do you think you are satisfying those that connect you to the King? I do not wish to carry these reflections further; I commit them to your integrity.”
Franklin essayed to mollify his host. He explained that by sending the preliminary agreement to America, he and his fellow commissioners were merely informing their masters of a work in progress. The British, no doubt, would send the news across the Atlantic to their officers. “It was certainly very incumbent on us to give Congress as early an account as possible of our proceedings, who must think it extremely strange to hear of them by other means without a line from us.”
Besides, the French government in fact had little cause for complaint. “Nothing has been agreed to in the preliminaries contrary to the interests of France, and no peace is to take place between us and England till you have concluded yours.” Franklin granted that the American commissioners had erred in a minor matter of form in not consulting the French court before signing the preliminary articles. “But as this was not from want of respect for the King, whom we all love and honour, we hope it may be excused, and the great work which has hitherto been so happily conducted, is so nearly brought to perfection, and is so glorious to his reign, will not be ruined by a single indiscretion of ours.” Already the British fancied they were causing a rift in the alliance. “I hope this little misunderstanding will therefore be kept a perfect secret, and that they will find themselves totally mistaken.”
It was too late for that. Franklin wrote to Vergennes on December 17; by December 19 London had the news from Edward Bancroft. British officials delighted at what one called Vergennes’s “storm of indignation” against Franklin, and they gleefully anticipated a falling-out between America and France, which could only benefit Britain.
Yet Vergennes had no intention of letting such a thing happen. Fully aware of British ambitions regarding the Americans, he was content to let Franklin know that King Louis was not pleased; then he allowed the American back into His Majesty’s good graces.
Which was precisely what Franklin had expected—as Vergennes doubtless realized. The two wily diplomats understood each other, and appreciated each other. Vergennes told the French ambassador in Philadelphia, Anne-César Luzerne, how all ended well at a recent interview with Franklin. “It passed very amiably for both of us. He assured me that the intention of his principals was not to take the least action at any time that might detract from the fidelity which they owed to their engagements and which, in spite of the necessity and the expediency of peace, they would renounce rather than neglect the obligations they have to the King and the gratitude they owe him.”
Franklin’s handling of Vergennes paid additional dividends when the foreign minister agreed to lend the United States more money. Better than Adams or Jay, Franklin understood that though the fighting was over, the American government needed money almost as much as ever. Its debts were daunting, and with the war’s focusing effect on the national psyche largely dissipated, the states would be even less likely than before to pay their shares. If Congress expected France to keep furnishing funds, it behooved American representatives to be considerate of French interests.
Franklin’s current application was for 20 million livres. Vergennes had professed to be aghast at its size. “That sum far exceeds all the proportions under consideration,” he said. Yet at this late hour France was not inclined to see the United States fail. Louis approved a new loan of 6 million livres, of which 600,000 would be delivered to Franklin at once for dispatch to America.
The approval of the aid did not mean that Franklin had heard the last of Louis’s annoyance. If nothing else, the French court intended to use the Americans’ indiscretion as a bargaining chip against them. Vergennes initially directed Ambassador Luzerne to remonstrate to Congress about the deception perpetrated by the American commissioners; after Franklin’s soothing letter and visit the foreign minister sent a new letter exonerating the commissioners. But Luzerne showed the first letter to the American foreign secretary, Robert Livingston, while verbally communicating the second—thereby reminding the Americans of their sins even while pardoning them. In a conversation with several members of Congress, Luzerne made clear (in the words of one member, James Madison) “that the King had been surprised and displeased and that he said he did not think he had such allies to deal with.” When one of the members asked whether Louis was going to file a formal complaint against Franklin and the other commissioners, Luzerne’s associate, François Barbé de Marbois, answered “that great powers never complained but that they felt and remembered.”
Had he been twenty years younger, Franklin might have summoned enthusiasm for this subtle game of nations. But probably not, even then; his was not a personality that reveled in intrigue and artful maneuvering. (It was perhaps significant in this regard that for all his affinity for chess, he never became very good at the game.)
Besides, he was tired. His gout and his stone—“the gout and gravel,” he called them—made it impossible for him to travel with comfort, sometimes to travel at all. “I cannot bear a carriage on pavement,” he wrote. The annual vacations that for years had guarded his health were out of the question. Entertainments that had enlivened his existence—a grand dinner he hosted on the second anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (the first anniversary since the alliance with France); a “salon” the following year, where his visage was celebrated in painting, in engraving, and in sculpture (“My face is almost as well known as that of the Moon,” he commented to Jane Mecom); the afternoons at Auteuil; the summer days at Moulin-Joli; the meetings of Masons at the Lodge of the Nine Sisters; the pursuit of his women friends—all were things of the past. The memory was pleasant, but repetition almost unthinkable. “Repose is now my only ambition,” he wrote in the spring of 1784.
Repose and retirement. This last comment was to John Jay and his wife, recently returned to America, where Jay would become foreign secretary. “Mr. Jay was so kind as to offer his friendly services to me in America,” Franklin reminded. “He will oblige me by endeavouring to forward my discharge from this employment.”
What would Franklin do on retirement? He thought seriously of staying in France. By the time his discharge arrived, he might be in no condition to return to America. “I may then be too old and feeble to bear the voyage.” Besides, France held much for him, and America less and less. “I am here among a people that love and respect me, a most amiable nation to live with; and perhaps I may conclude to die among them; for my friends in America are dying off, one after another, and I have been so long abroad that I should now be almost a stranger in my own country.”
Death held no terror for Franklin. To his friend George Whately he explained the principle of his bifocals and said they made his failing eyes almost as useful as ever. He went on, “If all the other defects and infirmities were as easily and cheaply remedied, it would be worth while for my friends to live a good deal longer; but I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.”
Some mornings he still rose refreshed. When he did, a measure of the old energy returned. And it was augmented by a new partner in diplomacy. The prospect of continued service with John Adams had been one reason Franklin was so eager to retire. In a transparent reference to Adams, Franklin wrote Robert Morris, “I hope the ravings of a certain mischievous madman here against France and its ministers, which I hear every day, will not be regarded in America.” To Henry Laurens, the long-absent American commissioner, Franklin wrote saying he wished Laurens could come to Paris. “Mr. Jay will probably be gone, and I shall be left alone, or with Mr. A., and I can have no favourable opinion of what may be the offspring of a coalition between my ignorance and his positiveness.”
Franklin received better than Laurens; in August 1784 the other missing commissioner, Thomas Jefferson, arrived. The contrast between Adams and Jefferson could hardly have been greater. Adams was jealous of Franklin (and of every other successful person he met); Jefferson easily accepted Franklin’s status as the greatest American of all. Adams embodied the prudishness of New England; Jefferson lived the tolerance of Virginia. Adams cared little for philosophy or speculation; Jefferson was a philosopher and scientist second among Americans only to Franklin. Adams distrusted France and inclined toward England; Jefferson felt just the opposite.
The arrival of this kindred spirit lifted Franklin’s own. Had he been more mobile he would have escorted Jefferson about Paris and to the court at Versailles; as it was, Jefferson met those of Franklin’s friends who called at Passy. Jefferson’s admiration for Franklin grew; the younger man later called the elder “the ornament of our country, and I may say, of the world.” When the Congress, after finally allowing Franklin to retire, named Jefferson the American minister to France, and he was introduced around Paris as the one who replaced Franklin, he liked to interject that though he might succeed Dr. Franklin, no one could replace him.
In his final months in Paris, Franklin oversaw negotiation of treaties with various countries; one, with Prussia, contained an article he thought should be generalized. In the event of war between them, the United States and Prussia would forgo the use of privateers. Although privateers had played a critical role for America in the late war, with Franklin urging the privateers on, he disliked this form of licensed lawlessness. Privateers were nothing better than pirates, and to allow—indeed encourage—their depredations was to foster disrespect for law and order. “Justice is as strictly due between neighbour nations as between neighbour citizens,” he wrote to Benjamin Vaughan, with the intention that his letter be published (it was). “A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.” Needless to say, Franklin believed that America’s defensive war against Britain had been just; it was this that excused America’s resort to privateers. But every war entailed injustice on one side or the other, and Franklin judged that the greater justice dictated abolition of this evil practice.
He appreciated that America would be giving up more than other countries by such a ban. The rich trade routes of the European powers to the West Indies ran right by American shores, making the merchant vessels of those powers tempting targets for American craft. But privateering under any flag was a heinous business, starting with theft and ending with murder. “It is high time, for the sake of humanity, that a stop be put to this enormity.” He and his fellow commissioners were trying to include antiprivateering clauses in all their treaties. “This will be a happy improvement in the law of nations. The humane and the just cannot but wish general success to the proposition.”
Franklin’s opposition to privateering suggested that he thought America would be involved in war rarely if ever; otherwise he would not so lightly have bargained away a potentially important American advantage. Indeed, a true son of the Enlightenment, he believed that wars would become less frequent—if national leaders employed their reason rather than their passions. To a correspondent who registered disapproval of war on grounds of its inhumanity, he agreed, then added that war was not simply inhumane but foolish. “I think it wrong in point of human prudence, for whatever advantage one nation would obtain from another, whether it be part of their territory, the liberty of commerce with them, free passage on their river, &c., it would be much cheaper to purchase such advantage with ready money, than to pay the expense of acquiring it by war.” An army was a “devouring monster” that had to be fed, clothed, housed, and otherwise tended to; beyond the cost of the army itself were “all the knavish charges of the numerous tribe of contractors.” If statesmen were better at arithmetic, wars would be far fewer. England might have purchased Canada from France for much less than England paid to fight the war that won that province. Similarly London was penny wise and pound foolish in its treatment of the American colonies. If Parliament had humored the Americans in their resistance to taxes, the British government might have got more through voluntary grants and contributions than her stamps and duties would ever have yielded. “Sensible people will give a bucket or two of water to a dry pump, that they may afterwards get from it all they have occasion for. Her ministry were deficient in that little point of common sense, and so they spent one hundred millions of her money, and, after all, lost what they had contended for.”
War and its avoidance were serious matters. The approaching end of Franklin’s public life encouraged such serious reflection. Yet the creator of Silence Dogood was older than the philosopher-diplomat, and must have his jokes.
In a short piece written for one of the Paris journals, Franklin reflected on the nocturnal habits of French high society, and recounted an astonishing discovery he had made. He had spent a March evening in company discussing the recent invention of a lamp by M. Quinquet; all present admired the lamp but wondered whether it did not burn oil excessively. The cost of lighting, everyone agreed, was outrageous, and must not be increased.
I went home, and to bed, three or four hours after midnight, with my head full of the subject. An accidental sudden noise waked me about six in the morning, when I was surprised to find my room filled with light; and I imagined at first that a number of those lamps had been brought into it; but, rubbing my eyes, I perceived the light came in at the windows. I got up and looked out to see what might be the occasion of it, when I saw the sun just rising above the horizon, from whence he poured his rays plentifully into my chamber, my domestic having negligently omitted, the preceding evening, to close the shutters.
Subsequent investigation revealed that this remarkable phenomenon occurred every morning, and in summer (here an almanac was consulted) still earlier. “Your readers, who with me have never seen any signs of sunshine before noon, and seldom regard the astronomical part of the almanac, will be as much astonished as I was, when they hear of his rising so early, and especially when I assure them that he gives light as soon as he rises.”
Savants with whom this finding had been shared refused to accept it. “One, indeed, who is a learned natural philosopher, has assured me that I must be mistaken as to the circumstance of the light coming into my room; for it being well known, as he says, that there could be no light abroad at that hour, it follows that none could enter from without; and that, of consequence, my windows, being accidentally left open, instead of letting in the light, had only served to let out the darkness.”
Yet additional experiments confirmed the truth that Paris lay in broad daylight for several hours before noon. This prompted certain deep, and most useful, reflections. “I considered that if I had not been awakened so early in the morning, I should have slept six hours longer by the light of the sun, and in exchange have lived six hours the following night by candle-light.” The latter being much dearer than the former, an elementary (if somewhat tedious) calculation revealed that the hundred thousand families of Paris might save more than 96 million livres every year by the simple device of rising with the sun.
For the great benefit of this discovery, thus freely communicated and bestowed by me upon the public, I demand neither place, pension, exclusive privilege, nor any other reward whatever. I expect only to have the honour of it.
And yet I know there are little, envious minds who will, as usual deny me this, and say that my invention was known to the ancients, and perhaps they may bring passages out of the old books in proof of it. I will not dispute with these people that the ancients knew not the sun would rise at certain hours; they possibly had, as we have, almanacs that predicted it; but it does not follow thence that they knew he gave light as soon as he rose.
This is what I claim as my discovery. If the ancients knew it, it might have been long since forgotten; for it certainly was unknown to the moderns, at least to the Parisians; which to prove, I need use but one plain simple argument. They are as well instructed, judicious, and prudent a people as exist anywhere in the world, all professing, like myself, to be lovers of economy; and, from the many heavy taxes required from them by the necessities of the state, have surely an abundant reason to be economical. I say it is impossible that so sensible a people, under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing.