The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (126 page)

Franklin underlined these last words, which went to the heart of the issue—and to the heart of Franklin himself. Friends—even close friends like William Strahan—Franklin could forgive for their political differences with him on the issue of allegiance to the Crown; family he could not. He insisted that William’s loyalty to his father come before his loyalty to his king.

Logic did not compel Franklin to frame the question this way. He did not accuse Loyalists as a group of waging war on him personally—of “taking up arms against me.” But he so accused William. He seems not to have considered that William might have leveled an analogous accusation against
him.
After all, Franklin was the rebel of the two. Perhaps Franklin felt a son owed more to his father in this regard than the father owed the son. Yet if such was his conception of filial relations, he certainly had showed no evidence of it in his dealings with his own father, whom he disregarded whenever interest bade him.

All his life Franklin had sought respect. His search had been stunningly successful by the standards of most mortals. No man on earth was more broadly respected than Benjamin Franklin. Even the British government, whose conspicuous disrespect had made him one of the most formidable enemies the Crown ever faced, had come round, as Shelburne made abundantly clear during the peace talks.

But William refused to accord him the respect he demanded. William was not allowed to discover his own mind and honor his own convictions. To disagree with his father was, on this critical issue, to disrespect him.

It was not Franklin’s finest hour. And he knew it. “This is a disagreeable subject,” he wrote William. “I drop it.” He promised to try to bury the past “as well as we can,” but his tone left William little room for hope.

Neither
did the sole meeting between the two. In May 1785 Franklin received the message he had long been awaiting. “You are permitted to return to America as soon as convenient,” wrote John Jay on
behalf of the Congress. Franklin’s French friends urged him to stay. “They press me much to remain in France,” he told Sally and Richard Bache, “and three of them have offered me an asylum in their habitations. They tell me I am here among a people who universally esteem and love me; that my friends at home are diminished by death in my absence; that I may there meet with envy and its consequent enmity which here I am perfectly free from; this supposing I live to complete the voyage, but of that they doubt.”

Franklin himself had some questions on that score. He was not sure he could find a ship that would not kill him crossing the ocean. Remembering his latest journey from America, before his stone started plaguing him, he declared, “I must be better stowed now, or I shall not be able to hold out the voyage.” The pain that accompanied the least journey on land made him dubious. But ultimately the desire “of spending the little remainder of life with my family” determined him to see if he could bear the motion of a ship. “If not, I must get them to set me on shore somewhere in the Channel, and content myself to die in Europe.”

He bade
au revoir
to Vergennes, who regretted his departure. “This minister has won the King’s esteem,” Vergennes remarked to one of his subordinates. “And I personally have the greatest confidence in his principles and in his integrity. The United States will never have a more zealous and more useful servant than Mr. Franklin.”

Franklin reciprocated the respect. “I think your minister, who is so expert in composing quarrels and preventing wars, the great blessing of this age,” he told a French friend. “The Devil must send us three or four heroes before he can get as much slaughter of mankind done as that one man has prevented.”

Finding a suitable ship required some weeks, and it was July before Franklin set out. “When he left Passy,” Jefferson recorded, “it seemed as if the village had lost its patriarch.” He had intended to float down the Seine on a barge, but a dry summer made navigation difficult. Instead the queen offered her royal litter, which was carried by two large mules—“who walk very easy,” Franklin was relieved to note. (King Louis’s gesture was a portrait of himself, framed in four hundred diamonds.) Several of Franklin’s friends accompanied him; count, colonel, and cardinal hosted him on his journey to the sea. Delegations from towns and villages en route greeted him; the Academy of Rouen presented him with a magic square said to represent his name in numbers. (“I have perused it since,” he wrote, “but do not comprehend it.”)

A letter awaited him at Havre. The leave-taking had been hardest for
the women Franklin loved, and who loved him. Madame Brillon could not bear to see him go. “My heart was so heavy yesterday when I left you,” she wrote, “that I feared, for you and for myself, another such moment which would have only added to my misery without further proving the tender, unchanging love I have devoted to you forever…. If it ever pleases you to remember the woman who loved you the most, think of me. Farewell, my heart was not meant to be separated from yours, but it shall not be. You shall find it near yours; speak to it and it shall answer you.”

Madame Brillon’s letter he read in his litter (with the aid of his double spectacles); the one that caught him at the coast was from Madame Helvétius.

I cannot get accustomed to the idea that you have left us, my dear friend; that you are no longer in Passy, that I shall never see you again. I can picture you in your litter, further from us at every step, already lost to me and to your friends who loved you so much and regret you so. I fear you are in pain, that the road will tire you and make you more uncomfortable.

If such is the case, come back, my dear friend; come back to us. My little retreat will be the better for your presence; you will like it because of the friendship you will find here and the care we will take of you. You will make our life happier; we shall contribute to your happiness.

To his surprise, the journey was quite tolerable. The mules earned their oats keeping him comfortable; he wrote Madame Helvétius that his strength was improving. He must go on, though his heart resisted. “We shall stay here a few days, waiting for our luggage, and then we shall leave France, the country that
I love the most
in the world. And there I shall leave my dear Helvetia. She may be happy yet. I am not sure that I shall be happy in America, but I must go back. I feel sometimes that things are badly arranged in this world when I consider that people so well matched to be happy together are forced to separate.” He closed as gallantly as ever: “I will not tell you of my love. For one would say that there is nothing remarkable or praiseworthy about it, since every body loves you. I only hope that you will always love me some.”

From Havre the Franklin party—consisting of himself, Temple, Benny, and Franklin’s nephew Jonathan Williams—traversed the Channel to Southampton, to catch a British ship. (Belatedly the French navy minister
declared, “Had I been informed of it sooner, I should have proposed to the king to order a frigate to convey you to your own country in a manner suitable to the known importance of the services you have been engaged in.” Franklin accepted the minister’s apologies.)

The Channel boat encountered stiff headwinds and contrary seas. For nearly two full days the craft pitched and the passengers moaned—all but Franklin, the one aboard who did not get sick. “I feel very well,” he wrote Madame Helvétius from Southampton—adding a last “I shall always love you.”

Several of his surviving English friends came to see him. Jonathan Shipley and family put up at the Star tavern with the Franklin party; it was probably Shipley who introduced Franklin to one of the local attractions. “I went at noon to bathe in Martin’s salt-water bath,” Franklin wrote, “and, floating on my back, fell asleep, and slept near an hour by my watch, without sinking or turning! a thing I never did before, and should hardly have thought possible. Water is the easiest bed that can be.”

Less pleasant was his meeting with William. The younger man still hoped for a reconciliation. He knew he would never see his father again, for age would claim the old man long before America would forgive the son. If they were ever to recapture some of the intimacy they had shared for many years, they would have to do so now.

The presence of Temple raised the emotional stakes for both men. Temple was the surrogate son Franklin had claimed after his own son abandoned him, and he did not want to give him up. Politics aside, he probably felt he had a better claim to Temple than William did, having raised Temple, educated him, and brought him to the beginning of a career. William doubtless regretted not having acknowledged Temple earlier, but he nonetheless must have felt that Franklin had stolen what was the natural right of all parents: the affection of a child. Franklin had grudgingly allowed Temple to visit William in London the previous summer. “I trust that you will prudently avoid introducing him to company that it may be improper for him to be seen with,” Franklin wrote William, in what could only have been interpreted as a condescending tone. And he chafed as long as Temple was away, urging him to write by every post and making plain that, at least in his view, Temple answered to him rather than to William.

The meeting of the three generations occurred under inauspicious circumstances. Franklin’s guests were coming and going; at the Star the three had scarce time and less privacy for the sort of soul-searching a genuine reunion required. Doubtless Franklin preferred it this way. Scars
had formed over the wounds he felt at what he considered his son’s betrayal; better not to reopen them.

Besides, there was business to transact. William had property in New Jersey and New York that was doing him no good; he decided to sell it to Temple. Franklin underwrote the transaction, applying toward the price various debts William owed him and authorizing William to seek payment from the British government of debts owed Franklin (William could keep half of any amount recovered; the other half would go to Sally). For the balance of 48,000 livres on the sale price, Franklin wrote to a banker friend in Paris for a loan.

William found the encounter acutely distressing. His hopes for reconciliation were dashed, his ties to his homeland severed. Shortly after Franklin and Temple sailed away, William wrote disconsolately that “my fate has thrown me on a different side of the globe.”

Franklin kept his feelings to himself, as he generally did on this most painful part of his life. He turned from William to Shipley and other friends. On July 27 the group went aboard the ship that would take the travelers to America. “The captain entertains us at supper,” Franklin recorded in his journal. “The company stay all night.”

Yet the company did not stay all night. After Franklin retired, Shipley and the others slipped to shore. “We all left your ship with a heavy heart,” Shipley’s daughter wrote Franklin later. “But the taking leave was a scene we wished to save you as well as ourselves.”

In the night the wind freshened, and the captain weighed anchor on the ebb tide. When Franklin awoke, the ship was miles at sea.

He had worried
that the voyage would kill him; instead it restored him. A single stormy day interrupted an otherwise smooth passage. Since a visit by Polly Hewson to Passy the previous winter, he had been gently trying to persuade her to move to America with her children (her husband having died); he booked a cabin large enough to accommodate the whole group. When she chose to remain in England, he was left with more room than he could fill.

For years his friends had implored him to complete his memoirs. First the war got in the way, then the peace negotiations, then the fact that he had lost the part already written. It was among papers he left in the care of Joseph Galloway upon departing America in 1776. Although Galloway espoused the British cause, he certainly would have respected
Franklin’s papers, but amid the confusion of the British occupation of Philadelphia his house was raided and its contents, including Franklin’s papers, scattered. Consequently, when Franklin had sat down at Passy to continue his tale, he had no record of what he had already written and few materials with which to go forward. He found the work difficult and unsatisfactory. When friends persisted in urging him to tell his story, he put them off by intimating he would take up pen once more during the leisure of his voyage home.