The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin (28 page)

REBUFFING BRITISH PEACE OFFERINGS

Franklin had to interrupt his constitution-making in 1776 to deal with a peace offering brought by the British commanders, General William Howe and Admiral Lord Richard Howe. Lord Howe had been a friend of Franklin in England, and he wrote Franklin an amicable letter in July 1776 in hopes of finding the means of reconciling America and Great Britain. With the authorization of Congress, Franklin responded in the most passionate and blunt terms. It was impossible, he told Howe, that Americans would think of submission to a government that had carried on an unjust and unwise war against them “with the most wanton Barbarity and Cruelty.” He knew only too well the “abounding Pride and deficient Wisdom” of the former mother country. Britain could never see her own true interests, for she was blinded by “her Fondness for Conquest as a Warlike Nation, her Lust of Dominion as an Ambitious one, and her Thirst for a gainful Monopoly as a Commercial one.”

Even in this quasi-official dispatch, Franklin could not help thinking of the breakdown of the empire in personal terms. He recalled that only a year and a half earlier, at Howe’s sister’s house in London, Lord Howe had given him expectations that reconciliation between Britain and her colonies might soon take place. Not only did Franklin have “the Misfortune to find those Expectations disappointed,” but he was soon “treated as the Cause of the Mischief I was labouring to prevent.” Franklin’s only “Consolation under that groundless and malevolent Treatment” was that he had “retained the Friendship of many Wise and Good Men in that Country.” His advice to Lord Howe was to resign his command and “return to a more honourable private Station.” Franklin’s angry letter shocked Howe. This was a very different Franklin from the one Howe had known eighteen months earlier in London.
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Thinking the Americans might be more open to a reconciliation following their defeat in the battle of Long Island in August 1776, Lord Howe tried once again. He asked the Continental Congress for some of its members to meet with him in a private conference on September 11. The Congress selected Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge to attend the meeting under a flag of truce. It was a loaded committee, since all three had signed the Declaration of Independence and were unlikely to retract that momentous decision. Franklin proposed that the committee meet Howe either at the New Jersey governor’s mansion at Perth Amboy, from which William had been forcibly removed as a prisoner of the patriots (a curious suggestion), or at Staten Island, which was occupied by British forces. Howe chose the latter.

On the way from Philadelphia to the meeting, the committee found the roads and inns crowded with troops and stragglers fleeing from the British forces in New York. In New Brunswick, Franklin and Adams were forced to share a room with a tiny window and a bed not much smaller than the room. This famous incident, recounted by Adams in his diary many years later, was one of Adams’s more benign memories of Franklin. The account reveals Adams’s talent as a storyteller, which under other circumstances might have made him a superb novelist.

Adams, who was just recovering from an illness, feared the night air blowing on him and shut the window. “Oh!” said Franklin, “Dont shut the window. We shall be suffocated.”

Adams answered that he was afraid of the evening air.

“The Air within this Chamber will soon be, and indeed is now worse than that without Doors,” replied Franklin. “Come! Open the Window and come to bed, and I will convince you: I believe you are not acquainted with my Theory of Colds.”

Adams opened the window and leaped into bed. He told Franklin that he had read his theory that no one ever got a cold going into a church or any other cold place. But “the Theory was so little consistent with my experience,” he said, “that I thought it a Paradox.” Adams was willing, however, to have it explained. “The Doctor then began a harangue, upon Air and cold and Respiration and Perspiration, with which I was so much amused that I soon fell asleep.”

Having the last laugh, Adams went on to point out that Franklin’s theory of colds ultimately did him in. “By sitting for some hours at a Window, with the cool Air blowing upon him,” in 1790 the eighty-four-year-old Franklin had “caught the violent Cold, which finally choaked him,” recalled Adams with more malice than he had expressed earlier in the story.
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At the meeting with Howe, the admiral explained that he could not officially treat with Franklin, Adams, and Rutledge as a committee of Congress, but he could confer with them “merely as Gentlemen of great Ability, and Influence in the Country” on the means of restoring peace between Britain and the colonies. Franklin said that his lordship could regard the committee as he wished, but he and his colleagues knew only too well what they represented. This was not a very auspicious beginning, revealing as it did how much catching up to American opinion the British government still had to do. Howe went on to say that he could not admit the idea of the colonies’ independence “in the smallest degree.” He suggested that Britain and America might return to the situation prior to 1765. But the committee, with Franklin passionately and sometimes sneeringly in the lead, declared emphatically that it was too late. “Forces had been sent out, and Towns destroyed,” said Franklin. America had already declared its independence, he concluded, and “could not return again to the Domination of Great Britain.”
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THE MISSION TO FRANCE

That independence, however, still had to be won, and most Americans thought they would need help from abroad to achieve it. In several letters to English friends, Franklin suggested the possibility of America’s appealing to a foreign power for assistance. In November 1775 the Continental Congress had appointed Franklin to a Committee of Secret Correspondence, which was to seek foreign support for the war. In December, Franklin asked a European
philosophe
in the Netherlands to find out whether some European state might be willing to aid the Americans. At the same time France, the greatest of the continental powers, had sent an agent to America to see whether the rebels were worth supporting. On behalf of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, Franklin wrote Connecticut merchant Silas Deane in March 1776 to engage him in secretly approaching the French government in order to secure money and arms.

After the Declaration of Independence that July, America’s situation was clarified and its search for foreign aid could be more open. Congress now realized that a formal commission of delegates was needed in Paris if the United States was to persuade France to join the war as America’s ally. Unlike Adams and Jefferson, who declined to become one of the commissioners to be sent to France, Franklin had no hesitation in accepting and, in fact, may have pushed to get the appointment. In October, Congress appointed Franklin to join Deane and Arthur Lee of Virginia, who was still in London, as a three-man commission to obtain arms and an alliance. The choice of Franklin was obvious. He was an international celebrity who knew the world better than any other American.

Franklin seems to have yearned to get back to the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps he felt he was the stranger in his own country that he predicted he might be. In a sketch written shortly after the meeting with Howe he outlined various conditions for peace that might be negotiated with Great Britain—including, of course, unconditional independence, but also Britain’s ceding to the United States for some sum of money all of Canada, the Floridas, Bermuda, and the Bahamas. One reason why such negotiations for peace with Britain were timely now, wrote Franklin, was that they might pressure the French into signing an alliance. But he added that such negotiations would also “furnish a pretence for BF’s going to England where he has many friends and acquaintance, particularly among the best writers and ablest speakers in both Houses of Parliament.” If the British balked at the terms of settlement, he wrote, then he was influential enough “to work up such a division of sentiments in the nation as greatly to weaken its exertions against the United States and lessen its credit in foreign countries.”
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Any excuse, it seemed, to get back across the Atlantic.

When people learned of Franklin’s planned mission to France, some were deeply suspicious of his motives. He was blamed once again for bringing about the Revolution, making people of the same empire “strangers and enemies of each other.” The British ambassador to France and many American loyalists thought that he was escaping America in order to avoid the inevitable collapse of the rebellion. Even his old friend Edmund Burke could not accept the news that Franklin was going on a mission to France. “I refuse to believe,” Burke wrote, “that he is going to conclude a long life which he brightened every hour it continued, with so foul and dishonorable [a] flight.”
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But Franklin was not fleeing America out of any fears for the success of the Revolution; he merely wanted to return to the Old World, where he felt more at home.

On October 26, 1776, Franklin sailed with his two grandsons, sixteen-year-old Temple, William’s illegitimate son, and seven-year-old Benjamin Franklin Bache, Sally’s boy. They arrived in France in December—after a bold and risky voyage, for, as Lord Rockingham noted, Franklin might have been captured at sea and “once more brought before an implacable tribunal.”
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That he took the voyage says a great deal about Franklin’s anger and his determination to defeat the British. It also says a great deal about his desire to experience once again the larger European world, where he had spent so much of his adult life. It would be nearly nine years before he returned to the United States.

Even before he reached France, Franklin was emotionally prepared for his new role as America’s representative to the world. Back in 1757, Thomas Penn had predicted that the highest levels of English politics would eventually be closed to Franklin. Whatever Franklin’s scientific reputation meant to the intellectual members of the Royal Society or the Club of Honest Whigs, Penn said, it would count for very little in the eyes of the ruling aristocracy, the “great People” who actually exercised political power.
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As Franklin himself came to this realization by the early 1770s, he began to see the English stage on which he had been operating as more and more limited. Suddenly his reputation “in foreign courts” as a kind of ambassador of America seemed to compensate for his loss of influence in England.

During his last years in London he proudly told his son that “learned and ingenious foreigners that come to England, almost all make a point of visiting me, for my reputation is still higher abroad than here.” He pointed out that “several of the foreign ambassadors have assiduously cultivated my acquaintance, treating me as one of their
corps."
Some of them wanted to learn something about America, mainly out of the hope that troubles with the American colonies might diminish some of Britain’s “alarming power.” Others merely desired to introduce Franklin to their fellow countrymen. Whatever the reasons for his extraordinary international reputation as the representative American, Franklin was well aware of it and was prepared to use it to help America.
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THE SYMBOLIC AMERICAN

In 1776 Franklin was the most potent weapon the United States possessed in its struggle with the greatest power on earth. Lord Rockingham observed at the time that the British ministers would publicly play down Franklin’s mission to France, but “inwardly they will tremble at it.”
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The British government had good reason to tremble. Franklin was eventually able not only to bring the French monarchy into the war against Britain on behalf of the new republic of the United States but also to sustain the alliance for almost a half-dozen years. Without his presence in Paris throughout that tumultuous time, the French would never have been as supportive of the American Revolution as they were. And without that French support, the War for Independence might never have been won.

The French knew about Franklin well before he arrived in 1776. The great French naturalist Comte de Buffon read his
Experiments and Observations on Electricity
in 1751 and urged a translation. The next year King Louis XV endorsed the publication of a translated edition of Franklin’s work and personally congratulated the author. In the years that followed, Franklin received letter after letter from French admirers of his electrical experiments. One of these admirers, Dr. Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, began exchanging writings with Franklin. He translated many of Franklin’s essays and works, including his testimony before the House of Commons in 1766, and had them reprinted in the French monthly
Ephémérides du citoyen.
Readers of the journal were told that from Franklin’s statements “they will see what constitutes the superiority of intelligence, the presence of mind and the nobility of character of this illustrious philosopher, appearing before an assembly of legislators.”
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His testimony in the House of Commons was eventually published in five separate French editions.

In 1767 and again in 1769 Franklin visited France, was presented to the king, and dined with the royal family. He was especially impressed with the politeness and urbanity of the French and, as he wrote in a playful letter to Polly Stevenson, he had started to become French himself. “I had not been here Six Days before my Taylor and Peruquier had transform’d me into a Frenchman. Only think what a Figure I make in a little Bag Wig and naked Ears! They told me I was become 20 Years younger, and look’d very galante; so being in Paris where the Mode is to be sacredly follow’d, I was once very near making Love to my Friend’s Wife.”
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During his visits to France, Franklin made many friends among French intellectuals. Dubourg described him in print as “one of the greatest and the most enlightened and the noblest men the new world had seen born and the old world has ever admired.”
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In 1772 Franklin was elected a foreign associate to the French Royal Academy of Science, one of only eight foreigners so honored. The next year Dubourg published two volumes of the
Oeuvres de M. Franklin,
prefixed with a print of Franklin that made him look like a Frenchman, together with the line “He stole the fire of the Heavens and caused the arts to flourish in savage climes.”
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In the preface Dubourg further sharpened the image of the backwoods philosopher emerging from the land of the peaceful Quakers.