The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (125 page)

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.

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Another bagatelle had a decidedly darker theme. It involved a lion, king of the beasts, who numbered among his subjects a body of faithful dogs, devoted to his person and government, and through whose assistance he had greatly extended his dominions. The lion, however, influenced by evil counselors, took an aversion to the dogs, condemned them unheard, and ordered his tigers, leopards, and panthers to attack and destroy them.

The brave dogs, dismayed at their master’s change of heart, reluctantly defended themselves—but not without internal dissent. “A few among them, of a mongrel race, derived from a mixture with wolves and foxes, corrupted by royal promises of great rewards, deserted the honest dogs and joined their enemies.”

After a sore struggle the dogs fought off the tigers, leopards, and panthers. In their victory they refused to suffer the return of the mongrels—who thereupon applied to the lion to fulfill the promises he had made. The wolves and the foxes supported their appeal and urged that every loyal subject of the lion should be taxed to that end.

Only the horse, with a boldness and freedom that became the nobility of his nature, spoke against the mongrels and the wolves and foxes. The lion, he said, had been misled by bad ministers to war unjustly on his faithful subjects. Royal promises, when made to encourage subjects to act for the public good, should indeed be honored; but if made to encourage betrayal and mutual destruction, they were wicked and void from the beginning. “If you enable the King to reward those fratricides, you will establish a precedent that may justify a future tyrant to make like promises; and every example of such an unnatural brute rewarded will give them additional weight.” Horses and bulls, as well as dogs, might thus be divided against their own kind, and civil wars produced at pleasure. All would be so weakened that neither liberty nor safety would survive, and nothing would remain but abject submission to a despot, “who may devour us as he pleases.”

At the time Franklin wrote this fable, the British Parliament was complaining at the Americans’ failure to compensate the Loyalists for their losses. The piece was written for a British audience; Franklin’s point was that the Loyalists did not deserve compensation—certainly not from the Americans, nor even from the British king or Parliament.

In some respects Franklin was a magnanimous victor. He repaired relations with old friends in England, resuming correspondence where the war had broken it off. But on the subject of the Loyalists he never relented. Indeed, he went so far as to deny they deserved the label they adopted. “The name
loyalist
was improperly assumed by these people,” he wrote a British friend. “
Royalists
they may perhaps be called. But the true loyalists were the people of America, against whom they acted.” Eventually Franklin acknowledged that if Parliament wished to compensate the Loyalists, it might do so. But his reasoning revealed his continuing bitterness. “Even a hired assassin has a right to his pay from his employer.”

Perhaps as consequence, perhaps as cause—probably as both—
Franklin’s feelings toward the Loyalists as a group were closely connected to his feelings toward William. In August 1784, after a hiatus of several years, he received a letter from his son. William had been released from custody in a prisoner exchange in 1778, and after four years among his fellow refugees in the vicinity of New York he sailed for London. There he took up the cause of the American Loyalists, becoming one of the wolves and foxes of his father’s fable—not to mention already being one of the foremost mongrels. For several months after the conclusion of the war neither father nor son made any move to contact the other, the former out of hurt and anger, the latter out of pride.

Finally the son took the step. Assuming that his father would be leaving France for America soon, and probably taking Temple with him, William averred his desire to “revive that affectionate intercourse and connexion which till the commencement of the late troubles had been the pride and happiness of my life.” He conceded that his actions during the war had disappointed his father. Yet an honorable man did what he must. “I uniformly acted from a strong sense of what I conceived my duty to my King and regard to my country.” At this late hour he would not apologize. “If I have been mistaken, I cannot help it. It is an error of judgment that the maturest reflection I am capable of cannot rectify, and I verily believe that were the same circumstances to occur tomorrow, my conduct would be exactly similar to what it was heretofore.” All this was history, however. He hoped to resume the relationship as it had been before the war.

“Dear Son,” Franklin replied. “I received your letter of the 22d past, and am glad to find that you desire to revive the affectionate intercourse that formerly existed between us. It will be very agreeable to me.”

Yet not really. “Let us now forgive and forget,” Franklin had said to Jonathan Shipley. But with William he could neither forgive nor forget.

Nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen sensations as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me, in a cause wherein my good fame, fortune and life were all at stake.

You conceived, you say, that your duty to your King and regard for your country required this. I ought not to blame you for differing in sentiment with me in public affairs. We are men, all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our own power; they are formed and governed much by circumstances that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible. Your situation was such that few would have censured your remaining neuter,
though there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguished by them.