Whether Adams’ boldness or Franklin’s smooth complaisance was the better course, “it is for Congress to judge.” Later, when Adams’ letters and Franklin’s covering dispatch were about to depart for America, Franklin generously informed Adams of the whole transaction and offered him an opportunity to enclose a letter defending his own point of view. Adams preferred to let the matter stand, but in his hypersensitive soul, the mere fact that Franklin was the transmitter of Vergennes’ rebuke was one more black mark against the American Ambassador.
While Adams was making trouble on the European side of the Atlantic, disturbing news came from America. Extending their southern offensive, the British captured Charleston, South Carolina, and an entire American army in May 1780, and three months later annihilated a second American army at Camden, South Carolina. With just a trace of discouragement in his words Franklin wrote to Adams, who had gone to Holland to solicit a loan from that neutral but British-leaning country. “Our credit and weight in Europe depend more on what we do than on what we say; and I have long been humiliated with the idea of our running about from court to court begging for money and friendship, which are the more withheld, the more eagerly they are solicited, and would perhaps have been offer’d if they had not been ask’d. . . The proverb says God helps them that help themselves. And the world, too, in this sense is very godly.”
In another moment of discouragement, he told Georgiana Shipley, who continued to correspond with Franklin, although her father as a Bishop sat in the House of Lords, “There has been enough blood spilt.” He yearned, he said, for “a peace solid and everlasting.” But even when his spirits were low, he could still joke. “It is a great while since I have heard anything of the good Bishop,” he told Georgiana. “Strange, that so simple a character should sufficiently distinguish one of that sacred body!” Shipley was the only member of the British hierarchy who steadfastly opposed the war, and it cost him his chance to become Archbishop of Canterbury.
On top of all these political and diplomatic woes, Franklin’s health broke down. In October 1780, he took to his bed with the worst attack of gout he had ever suffered. For six weeks he was prostrate and in severe pain, and even when he pronounced himself recovered, he was so weak and his feet and knees so tender that he was unable to attend diplomatic ceremonies at Versailles. “Going up and down stairs is exceedingly difficult and inconvenient to me,” he told his friend Charles W. F. Dumas, who was still laboring on behalf of the United States in Holland.
From America came more bad news of a depressing personal sort. William Franklin had been exchanged late in 1778 and had spent the next eighteen months in New York, vainly attempting to persuade the British Army to let him play a role in the war. Finally, thanks largely to pressure from England, the Army had permitted William to form a “Board of Associated Loyalists” of which he had become president. It was a guerrilla organization, committed to that most hateful brand of warfare, and they were soon launching raids against fellow Americans loyal to Congress in New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. The news could only have intensified the bitter pain Franklin still felt at William’s defection. Now he was not only a political enemy, he was spilling the blood of fellow Americans, the blood of men who were loyal to the cause that Franklin was leading. Perhaps one needs to experience leadership, to understand the intense solidarity which the leader, particularly a man as paternal as Franklin, feels for those who follow him. The news that his son had taken up the gun, the knife, and the torch of the midnight raider in distant New York was as dismaying to Franklin as if William and his guerrillas had appeared in Passy to attack his French friends and neighbors. In Franklin’s mind it destroyed all hope of ever again bridging the gulf which had opened between them.
Then came more dismaying news from America. Ralph Izard had joined Arthur Lee in Congress, and he persuaded a fellow member from South Carolina to introduce a motion to recall Franklin. Izard, seconding the demand, declared, “The political salvation of America depends upon the recalling of Dr. Franklin.” Arthur Lee backed it with a pamphlet, accusing Franklin of mulcting millions from American funds in France. The recall motion was put to a vote, and lost, eleven to two, but it must have caused Franklin a pang to learn that Massachusetts, the state of his birth, for whom he had risked so much as an agent in England, and which he still called “my country,” had voted against him. But even more humiliating news was to come. Congress was sending Colonel John Laurens, one of Washington’s aides and a son of the former president of Congress, as an envoy extraordinary to plead for additional help from France.
The very name Laurens instantly raised Franklin’s hackles. The father, Henry Laurens, had sided with the Lees and Adams in Congress so blatantly that the members had finally made it clear that they had lost confidence in him and he had resigned as president. He had then accepted an assignment to negotiate a treaty with Holland and had been captured on the high seas, with all his confidential papers. The British had used the papers as a pretext for declaring war on Holland, largely to give them a chance to seize Dutch West Indies islands which the Americans were using to transship war supplies. Laurens himself was thrown into the Tower of London, where he became another Franklin headache. Through his liberal friends in Parliament, the Ambassador lobbied and pressured for humane treatment of Laurens, completely ignoring the fact that he had been a political adversary.
It was hard for Franklin to see the appointment of Laurens’ son as anything but a grim sign that Congress had lost confidence in its Ambassador’s effectiveness. It was time to counterattack, or surrender. Franklin disliked surrenders. He proceeded to write a letter to Vergennes that was a diplomatic tour de force. There was nothing new in handing Vergennes another appeal from Congress for money. Franklin had shuffled so many of these across his desk that it was certain to produce nothing more than a yawn of boredom from the French diplomat. So, after a brief mention that Congress was begging for money once more, Franklin unveiled two authorities that were far more likely to make the Count sit up and listen. “The Marquis de la Fayette writes to me that it is impossible to conceive, without seeing it, the distress the [American] troops have suffer’d for want of clothing; and the following is a paragraph of a letter from General Washington, which I ought not to keep back from Your Excellency, viz. Our present situation makes one of two things essential to us; a peace, or the most vigorous aid of our allies, particularly in the article of money.”
Then Franklin added the weight of his own prestige, with an elegiac touch that made it personal and more likely to penetrate the Count’s defenses. “I am grown old. I feel myself much enfeebled by my late long illness, and it is probable I shall not long have any more concern in these affairs. I therefore take this occasion to express my opinion to Your Excellency, that the present conjuncture is critical; that there is some danger lest the Congress should lose its influence over the people, if it is found unable to procure the aids that are wanted; and that the whole system of the new govern’t in America may thereby be shaken . . .” Franklin ended with a note of somber warning.
If the British recovered America, the opportunity for separating the colonies and the mother country “may not occur again in the course of ages.” And in a decade or two, the English might draw from America’s commerce and soaring population the wealth, the seamen, and the soldiers that “. . . will enable them to become the terror of Europe.”
Franklin followed up this letter with a note, two weeks later that was practically an ultimatum. Vessels were sailing for America, and he insisted on having an answer to the “application” for supplies and money. Vergennes instantly granted an interview and, after lecturing Franklin on the difficulty France had raising money for its own expenses in the war, informed him that the King had decided to grant America 6,000,000 livres, not as a loan, but as a free gift. “This sum,” Franklin proudly informed the president of Congress, “was exclusive of the three millions which he had before obtained for me to pay the Congress’s drafts for int
erest &c. expected in the current year.” Thus, without a hint of rebuke or acrimony, Franklin coolly informed the Congress that he had obtained, as a free gift, at least as much as Colonel Laurens had hoped to borrow before the envoy extraordinary even arrived.
Franklin now unleashed a little psychological warfare on his fellow Americans. In the same letter that announced his diplomatic triumph in the matter of French aid, he resigned as Ambassador to the court of Versailles. “I have passed my seventy-fifth year,” he wrote, “and I find the long and severe fit of gout, which I had the last winter, has shaken me exceedingly, and I am yet far from having recovered the bodily strength I before enjoyed. I do not know that my mental faculties are impaired; perhaps I shall be the last to discover that; but I am sensible of great diminution of my activity, a quality I think particularly necessary in your minister for this Court.” With just a touch of pride, and a neat reminder in the bargain, he added, “I have been engag’d in public affairs, and enjoyed public confidence, in some shape or other, during the long term of fifty years, and honours sufficient to satisfy any reasonable ambition; and I have no other left but that of repose, which I hope the Congress will grant me.” He insisted that the resignation was not prompted by “the least doubt of . . . success in the glorious Cause, nor any disgust” received in its service. Since his health did not permit him to risk a sea voyage, he planned to remain in France, and was ready to assist the new Ambassador “with any influence I may be supposed to have, or counsel that may be desired of me.” With his usual combination of shrewdness and personal diplomacy, Franklin tried to pick his successor. His choice was young John Jay, who was vainly trying to persuade the Spaniards in Madrid to part with some of their money for the American cause. Franklin sent a copy of his letter of resignation to Jay, telling him, “I wish you to succeed me here. No copy of the letter is yet gone from France . . . nor have I mentioned my intention to anyone here: If therefore the change would be agreeable to you, you may write to your friends accordingly.”
Franklin knew only too well that when a man in high office is under attack, the perfect way to silence his enemies is to proffer his resignation and force the issue to an immediate decision. This was precisely what happened. The moment word of Franklin’s request became known, a chorus of supporters rallied to his side. From Madrid, John Jay proved himself a disinterested patriot, by writing an alarmed letter to Congress, urging them to reject the resignation. He corresponded with Franklin regularly, Jay avowed, and there was not an iota of senility in his letters. More important, there was simply no one who could match his enormous prestige in Europe. “I confess,” wrote Jay, “it would mortify my pride as an American, if his constituents should be the only people to whom his character is known that should deny his merit and services the testimony given them by other nations.” John Laurens, the envoy extraordinary, who finally arrived in Paris and conducted a whirlwind campaign to supplement the gift Franklin had obtained with an additional loan, was even more impressed by the vigorous cooperation Franklin gave him in every possible way. Although Laurens failed, except to persuade the French (with Franklin’s help) to let him bring back to America with him 2,500,000 livres in cash, the young colonel returned to Congress to inform them that if they accepted Franklin’s resignation, they were out of their minds. What Franklin needed was not a replacement, but help. Laurens told the Congressmen that they were asking a seventy-five-year-old man to function simultaneously as an ambassador and admiralty judge and the American Army’s purchasing agent, with no one to assist him but a twenty-year-old boy. What he needed was a competent staff to handle the million and one details that inundated the embassy. The result was almost a foregone conclusion. Congress voted overwhelmingly to refuse Franklin’s resignation.
The lack of anguish the Ambassador displayed on hearing this news, in August 1781, makes it clear that he had hardly expected or desired a contrary answer. “I must therefore buckle again to business,” he wrote to William Carmichael, “and thank God that my health and spirits are of late improved. I fancy it may have been a double mortification to those enemies you have mentioned to me, that I should ask as a favour what they hoped to vex me by taking from me; and that I should nevertheless be continued. . . I call this continuance an honour, and I really esteem it to be a greater than my first appointment, when I consider that all the interest of my enemies, united with my own request, were not sufficient to prevent it.”
But as always, Franklin’s sense of humor and unillusioned view of human nature saved him from a swollen head. When another friend congratulated him on his reappointment and called him the keystone of the American arch, he turned the compliment aside with a funny story. It reminded him, he said, of a farmer in Pennsylvania who sent two servants to borrow a harrow from a neighbor. They were about to pick it up and lug it home when one of them said, “What could our master mean by sending only two men to bring this harrow. No two men upon earth are strong enough to carry it.” “Poh!” said the other, who considered himself the local strong man. “What do you talk of two men, one man may carry it. Help it upon my shoulders and see.” So the muscular boobie staggered home with the harrow on his shoulders, while his shrewd friend followed him exclaiming, “Zounds, how strong you are. I could not have thought it. Why you are a Samson.” Franklin was pointing out that Congress was paying him the same kind of compliment, by reappointing him to his job, and its headaches.
Less than a month later, Franklin was telling Superintendent of Finances Robert Morris that the continued blizzard of bills from Congress, coupled with a stern letter from Vergennes that there was a limit to French generosity, “terrifies me.” He had promised Vergennes that Congress would draw no more bills on Europe after March 1781. But now the Ambassador was seeing bills drawn as late as June 22. He told Morris that he could not possibly pay these since he had promised Vergennes that he had enough money to end the year “with honour.” To Thomas McKean, the new president of Congress, Franklin sent an earnest warning. The French were still good friends of America, he said, “but the best of friends may be overburthened . . . by too frequent, too large and too importunate demands.”
When a merchant named John de Neufville, with whom John Adams was doing business in Holland, seized 50,000 pounds’ worth of war supplies which Adams had purchased and refused to deliver them until the Americans paid a petty damage claim, Franklin exploded with the wrath of a man who was determined to suffer no more financial embarrassments. “I would not be compell’d to pay whatever he may please to demand, because he has our goods in possession,” Franklin told Adams. “We have, you observe, our hands in the lyons mouth; but if Mr. N. is a lyon, I am a bear, and I think I can hug & gripe him until he lets go our hands.”
Franklin’s touchiness on money matters was no doubt explained in part by the mental, emotional, and political collapse of Silas Deane. After waiting in vain for Congress to reimburse him for the money he had spent on America’s behalf in Paris, he had returned to Europe as a private citizen, hoping to have the accounts he left there audited. When he arrived, he found out that the man whom Congress had appointed to do the job had declined, and this meant an inevitable delay of six months to a year. Desperate for money, deeply embittered by the treatment he had received in Philadelphia, and already compromised through his ties to Bancroft, Deane retreated to Ghent, Holland, and sold out completely to the English. In return for 3000 pounds in goods, to be delivered in America on his account, he wrote a series of letters denouncing the French alliance and urging America to sign a truce with England.
The letters were supposedly to a private friend in America, and Deane arranged for the British to intercept them. George III thought they had “too much the appearance of being concerted with this country,” but he had them published in Rivington’s Royal Gazette in New York anyway. People who had defended Deane in Congress, such as John Jay and Robert R. Livingston, could not believe the letters were genuine. But Franklin, replying to an inquiry from Livingston, now forei
gn secretary, mournfully reported, “There is no doubt of their being all genuine. . . . He has sent me a letter of twenty full pages, recapitulating those letters, and threatening to write and publish an account of the treatment he has receiv’d from Congress, &c. He resides at Ghent, is distressed both in mind and circumstances, raves and writes abundance, and I imagine it will end in his going over to join his friend Arnold in England.”
Franklin refused to back down on his judgment of the Silas Deane he had known in 1776. “I believe he was then sincere and hearty in our Cause,” he said. A few days later, he wrote a mournful farewell to “the Honble. Silas Deane, Esq.” He declined to enter into a political debate with him. “To me it appears that your resentments and passions have overcome your reason and judgment; and tho my ancient esteem & affection for you induce me to make all the allowances possible . . . yet the length you have gone in endeavoring to discourage and diminish the number of the friends of our country and cause in Europe and America and to encourage our enemies . . . make it impossible for me to say with the same truth & cordiality as formerly that I am
Your affectionate friend
& humble servant,
B. Franklin”
About a month after he was reconfirmed as Ambassador, Franklin received an even more momentous honor from Congress, he was appointed, along with John Jay and John Adams, a member of a new five-man peace commission that replaced John Adams’ one-man mission. Franklin immediately wrote to the touchy Adams, who was still in Holland, telling him that he esteemed it “an honour to be joined with you in so important a business.” With humorous wisdom, he added that he had never known a peace made, even the most advantageous, that was not criticized and the makers condemned as injudicious or corrupt.” Blessed are the peacemakers’ is, I suppose, to be understood in the other world,” Franklin warned, “for in this they are frequently curs’d.”
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