The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (118 page)

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.