by Ron Carter
“There’s one more thing. Congress sent Benjamin Franklin and some others to France to work out the terms of the peace treaty with the British. They’ve been at it for two years now, and the news is the terms are concluded. They’re just waiting to get it in writing and signed by all three countries—America, England, and France. I know John Adams was there, and that he arranged a loan from Holland that saved us after Yorktown. Maybe Franklin and Adams and Jay have arranged for other loans. Maybe from Spain, or more from Holland. If they did, and the loans are big enough, maybe there will be enough gold or coin to save the country. At least for now.”
A time passed before Billy answered. “Maybe. But in the meantime, I’m going to talk to banks about using congressional promises as collateral for buying a shipping business.”
Matthew nodded. “I’ll talk with some companies about the same thing.”
“Talk with Kathleen. And your mother. I’ll talk with my family.”
They walked on in silence, down the twisting street, not noticing the heat of midday or the people or the carts passing by. In their minds they were pushing and pulling and twisting the doubtful question of whether a bank, and a shipping business owner, would ever consider accepting a written promise from the Continental Congress to pay in gold at some future time.
Maybe. Maybe.
And behind that question was another.
Had Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, John Jay, and Henry Laurens gone one step beyond the peace treaty with France and England and persuaded someone—anyone—to loan the newborn United States millions of Spanish dollars or Dutch guilders or French livres to save the infant nation from collapse?
Maybe. Maybe.
They walked on through the narrow streets of Boston toward home, hating the indecision, hating the “maybes” that were leading them from the secure life they had known, steadily downward into a black, bottomless abyss.
Notes
For an excellent map of the Boston Commons and The Neck and Boston Peninsula, showing the various wharves in colonial times as named in this chapter, see Freeman, Washington, p. 229.
By order of Congress, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, John Adams, and Henry Laurens negotiated the peace treaty with England, called the Paris Peace Treaty because negotiations were conducted in Paris over a two-year period. Franklin’s grandson, William Temple Franklin, had been selected by Benjamin Franklin to act as scribe and secretary (McCullough, John Adams, pp. 278–80).
The selling or bartering by discharged soldiers of their muskets and equipment, as well as their written promises from Congress or their home state to pay them, was a common practice to get enough money for the long walk home (Martin, Private Yankee Doodle, pp. 279–89).
Passy, France
Early August 1783
CHAPTER XV
* * *
The weight of his seventy-seven years, and the gout that plagued his legs, and the sultry heat of a late July midmorning in Passy, France, all came together to make rising from a chair, or sitting down on one, a matter of teeth-clenching torture for Benjamin Franklin. Wearing his robe and slippers, he used his cane to hobble to the table in the home he had acquired in the village bordering Paris, and laboriously settled onto his breakfast chair. His once muscular frame and square face now tended toward paunch and flesh. His eyes were a study in the lifelong discipline of shielding secrets and schemes known only to himself, and his jowls were beginning to sag. For a fleeting moment he regretted his recklessness the previous night at the sumptuous banquet and ball hosted by the Dutch Embassy in Paris.
It wasn’t attending that he regretted. It was his abandon, his lack of self-discipline. He was the darling of the continent of Europe! Inventor, author, scientist, printer, businessman, politician, sage, philosopher, genius, he was the most intriguing, charming, famous person in their world, age notwithstanding! In the grand palaces and halls of kings and princes and ambassadors and foreign ministers, where every man and woman had spent a fortune on silks and satins and tailors and powdered wigs and hairdressers to be certain they were the most desirable, elegant creatures in sight, Franklin’s plain, brown, colonial suit, and his refusal to wear a powdered wig drew subtle, venomous comment from the men, while it drew the most famous of the richly gowned women to him like flies to honey. If anyone wished to know where Minister Plenipotentiary Benjamin Franklin of the United States was in the unending Parisian social whirl, they simply asked which embassy was hosting the nightly banquet and ball, went there, and sought out the largest cluster of richly appointed women. Franklin would be in the center, standing out like an aging turkey among young peacocks, smiling, kissing hands, shamelessly flattering every woman within earshot, whispering confidences into waiting ears, entering into the quadrilles and waltzes with the most dazzling dancing partners, toasting with the costliest champagne in France, holding forth until past two o’clock in the morning, and groaning with remorse as his crippled legs and hips took the bumpy cobblestone ride back to his residence in Passy.
For a moment Franklin looked out the window beside the table, taken by the myriad of roses and lilies set in banks and rows in the small garden. He tucked the large white napkin beneath his ample chin, poured steaming hot chocolate into a china cup, and closed one eye to gingerly sip at it. He smacked singed lips and reached for a thick slice of toasted brown bread and a knife to spread butter and strawberry jam. Hot, sweet chocolate sided by rich French bread and butter, topped with too much strawberry jam was his panacea for his wastrel ways. He was using a small spoon to dig the last morsels of a poached egg from the shell when a knock came at his door.
“Yes,” he called, “I’m here. Come in.” He turned, smiling, calling to his grandson in the parlor. “William? That you?”
“Yes, sir. Just came to report that—”
“Come in here,” Franklin called. “Have a chair. Some toast and jam. The French have a way with strawberry jam.”
The young man appeared in the doorway. “Just came to remind you that the others will be here at eleven o’clock. Is there anything you wish me to do that is not done?”
Franklin pursed his mouth in thought. “You have six copies of the final draft of the treaty?”
“Yes.”
“My notes?”
“Yes.”
Franklin shrugged. “That should be all.”
“Good. I’ll come for you when they’re in the library.”
Franklin gestured. “Won’t you have some of this bread and jam?”
“I’ve had breakfast, thank you.”
Thirty minutes later William again rapped at the door, then assisted Franklin with his cane down the hall and into the library. Franklin nodded to the others as he made his way to his large, overstuffed chair near the stone fireplace, leaned his cane against the padded arm, and slowly lowered himself into the cushions.
“Ah, there,” he sighed as he looked about, smiling. “Gentlemen, it’s good of you to come. Hopefully we can conclude this business of the treaty. William, do these gentlemen have copies of the final draft? Do you have one?”
“Yes.”
“May I have my notes?”
William handed him two sheets of paper, and Franklin spent several seconds working with his spectacles as he read them. He raised his head and looked at the four silent, waiting men.
To his left, John Jay. Tall, slender, hawk-nosed, hawk-faced, born to wealth in New York, Jay moved with a slight, unconscious air of haughtiness. A keen mind and a native tendency to speak his thoughts freely brought him to Congress, where he had distinguished himself. His peers selected their rising star to represent the United States in Spain in the hope his talents could sway the courteous but intractable King Charles III to loan gold or Spanish dollars to the desperate American cause. Jay not only failed, he was embittered at the condescending Spanish aloofness that proved to be an impenetrable wall. He was all too happy at the end of his second year to receive orders to abandon the failed Spanish effort and join Benjamin Franklin
and John Adams in Paris in their monumental efforts to strike a peace treaty with the defeated British. He arrived with renewed enthusiasm and became one of the few living men who got on acceptably well with John Adams, who was ten years his senior.
John Adams of Massachusetts. Shorter than average, stocky, regular features, receding hairline, he was also obstinate, defiant, and opinionated. When John Adams reached a conclusion on anything, it became instantly and irrevocably the only conclusion for all right-thinking, reasonable men. To be sure, his dedication to the American cause, vision, and industry was constant and recognized by his peers to be rare indeed. But from all outward appearances, it never occurred to Mr. Adams that he could commit error in his thought processes, and his self-confidence was exceeded only by his colossal ability to ignore the credentials and station of those whom he chose to shred to make himself understood; and that included King Louis XVI himself, to whom Adams sent notes and letters that at once demeaned the King and elevated Mr. Adams. Mr. Adams’s methods of conducting politics and negotiations had much more in common with the hammer of a blacksmith, than those of a skilled statesman. It was Mr. Adams who ripped into the peace negotiations so vociferously that the Comte de Vergennes of France, the prime minister appointed by King Louis XVI to handle all matters of state, furiously delivered three monstrous letters.
The first was to Mr. Adams himself: “His Majesty does not stand in need of your solicitations to direct his attention to the interests of the United States.”
The second was to Mr. Benjamin Franklin, together with a collection of the notes and letters Mr. Adams had written to enlighten both the King and Vergennes. With the Adams notes and letters, over his own signature, Vergennes had bluntly informed Franklin, “His Majesty expects that you will lay the whole before Congress.”
The third was to La Luzerne, the French representative in Philadelphia where Congress was in session: “You are directed to do all possible to have Mr. Adams recalled.”
Thoughtfully Franklin wrote his own missive to Congress, candidly and brutally calling out the fact Adams had badly mauled just about everybody involved in the peace effort, thoroughly wrecked a substantial part of what had been accomplished, and appeared to be blindly dedicated to finishing his destruction. Franklin concluded his letter:
“Mr. Vergennes, who appears much offended, told me yesterday that he would enter into no further discussions with Mr. Adams, nor answer any more of his letters . . .”
It was at that time that Mr. Adams was spared what had the makings of either his political demise in France, or a devastating international incident, by voluntarily announcing to Franklin that he was departing Paris at once, in favor of going to Holland to see “. . . whether something might be done to render us less dependent on France.”
No one was more relieved than Vergennes to see Mr. Adams depart France, and Vergennes instantly and happily provided the passports and documents to accommodate his leaving. Eventually Mr. Adams succeeded in persuading a reluctant Holland to recognize the United States as a free and independent nation, securing for the newborn member of the international community, a loan from three Dutch banks of two million dollars at five percent per annum interest. Then he returned to his duties in Paris, to learn of the letter written by Franklin to the United States Congress. Furious, he fumed, recovered, and passed it off by declaring to himself that the sole motive Franklin would ever have in writing such a horrific accusation was Franklin’s base jealousy of Adams.
Henry Laurens. Tall, well-built, handsome, brilliant, once vice president of the state of South Carolina, Henry Laurens had been ordered by Congress to Amsterdam in late 1780 with a secret draft of a proposed treaty between the United States and the Netherlands. Disaster struck when Laurens’s ship was captured by a British man-of-war and alert British seamen saw Laurens throw the document into the sea. They fished it from the water and presented it, along with Laurens, before a British court. The charge was high treason. The secret treaty, innocuous at best, was enough for the British court to convict Laurens and sentence him to be held prisoner in the Tower of London indefinitely, with orders that “no person whatever speaks to him.”
There Laurens remained, languishing, health in serious decline, until the Americans shocked the world at Yorktown by capturing General Charles Cornwallis and his entire army in October 1781. An exchange of prisoners was arranged—Cornwallis for Laurens—and thereupon Congress ordered Laurens to proceed to Paris to assist Franklin and the group then concluding the terms of the peace treaty with England. Plagued by ill health, and struggling to recover from two years of solitary confinement in a cold stone tower, Laurens was at times subdued, quiet, reflective, but in all, valuable in his efforts to secure the terms of peace.
Of the group of Americans, it was John Jay who most often provided the oil to calm the troubled waters that sometimes roiled between Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, and it was Franklin’s profound insights into the nature of human beings and his extraordinary grasp of the ways of the world that undergirded much of the thought that structured the treaty.
With young William Temple Franklin, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, serving as secretary and scribe, this collection of strongly opinionated, talented men had met for nearly two years with the two men appointed by King George III, Richard Oswald, assisted by Henry Strachey. Oswald, an elderly Scot who, though blind in one eye, had amassed a fortune in government contracts, tended to favor the independence of the Americans. A disturbed Lord Shelburne, First Lord of the Treasury in the cabinet of King George III of England, sensed Oswald’s weakness, and immediately sent Henry Strachey to assist Oswald, with orders to “stiffen Oswald’s resolve.”
For well over a year these opposing teams had met in formal negotiations, either at Jay’s lodgings at the Hotel d’Orleans on the Rue des Petits-Augustins on the Left Bank, or at Adams’s Hotel du Roi, or at the Hotel de Valentinois at Passy when Franklin’s gout would not tolerate the carriage ride into Paris, or at the quarters of Oswald at the Grand Hotel Muscovite on the Rue des Petits-Augustins.
With Adams relentlessly pounding, Jay lending nominal support and reconciliation between the others, Laurens raising a more moderate voice, and Franklin providing insights, it soon became obvious, although never articulated, that the two Britons, trained in politics as they were, fell short of being a match for the four self-educated Americans. With stubborn resolve the Yankees won major concessions as the two opposing groups slowly forged the concluding terms of the treaty. Franklin let it rest for a few weeks while the British team returned to London to report to their own King and Parliament, then, as senior member of the American delegation, called his associates to meet with him in the library of his residence. Franklin knew only too well how second thoughts and crafty maneuvers in such matters could lay waste the finalized work of years. Under any circumstance, Franklin was not going to allow Adams, or Jay, to hold the two nations hostage at the last moment by stubbornly refusing to sign the treaty until one of their discarded pet proposals was added to the finished document. It did not take long for Franklin’s nimble mind to devise a scheme to accomplish this, and at the same time avoid giving offense to either Adams or Jay: He called them together in his quarters for a meeting to solidify their understanding.
Franklin glanced at his colleagues and smiled amicably. “Gentlemen, it now appears the formalities of signing the treaty will occur sometime in September. Ahh, it occurred to me that our worthy opponents might attempt to recover some of what they’ve given us by laying down an eleventh-hour ultimatum. Either we concede on some of the major points, or they refuse to sign.”
Adams was vociferous. Jay was loquacious. Laurens was thoughtful. Franklin was noncommittal.
“It seemed to me that we would be wise to anticipate such a maneuver. So I requested your presence here for a brief review of the terms as they now stand. If we are clear in our minds on all points, and if we are united, we will be much better prepared for any such nonsense should it occu
r. Rest assured, if Mr. Oswald or Mr. Strachey finds a difference among us, they will waste no time driving a wedge. Don’t you agree?”
There was no question. All agreed.
“Very good. Now, let’s run a brief review to be certain there will be no divisions among us. You each have a copy of the major elements of the treaty, and I invite you to follow me. Should there be any questions, now is the time to resolve them.
“Let us begin. The British have conceded that the United States is an independent nation, to be recognized and dealt with as an equal in the community of nations.”
Franklin looked at each man in turn, and each nodded assent.
“Moving on. The United States has the primary right of navigation on the Mississippi River.” He paused for a moment. “Time and the needs of commerce will prove this to be an invaluable asset to the growth of America. Agreed?”
There was silent agreement.
“Next. Americans will have free rights to take fish of all descriptions on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.”
Franklin looked at Adams, who had made it abundantly clear that the New England fishermen would have those rights, or there would be no treaty. Adams glowed with his victory, and Franklin said, “The New Englanders shall be forever grateful, good sir.” He turned back to his notes.
“Most critical. The British shall cede all territory between the Appalachian Mountains on the east, and the Mississippi on the west, to the United States, free and clear of any and all claims of any description.”
The men looked at each other, still staggered by the fact that this provision instantly doubled the size of the United States. All heads nodded in agreement.
Franklin again studied his notes for a few seconds. “Extremely critical. All private debts contracted by Americans with British merchants prior to the outbreak of hostilities between the two countries, shall remain valid and enforceable.”