When Adams finally had a private conversation with John Jay, even he was appalled by the depth of Jay’s French paranoia. “Mr. Jay likes Frenchmen as little as Mr. Lee and Mr. Izard did. He says they are not a moral people; and they know not what it is; he don’t like any Frenchmen; the Marquis de Lafayette is clever, but he is a Frenchman. Our allies don’t play fair, he told me. . . .”
His heart palpitating with anticipation, Adams, four days after he arrived in Paris, having spent most of the intervening time talking to nobodies like Ridley, finally found the good grace to call on Franklin. Most of the visit was consumed by a typical Adams harangue. “I told him without reserve my opinion of the policy of this Court, and of the principles, wisdom and firmness with which Mr. Jay had conducted the negotiation in his sickness and my absence, and that I was determined to support Mr. Jay to the utmost of my power in the pursuit of the same system. The Doctor heard me patiently, but said nothing.” As Adams was leaving, however, Franklin quietly reminded him that he had been in Paris almost a week, and had yet to call on Vergennes, a diplomatic gaffe of the first order.
Here was the foremost of several reasons why Franklin made no attempt to restrain the headstrong moralism of his two colleagues. Jay and Adams acted as if the French alliance were a mere bagatelle which America could discard with a shrug. Franklin, with frantic letters on his desk from Congress urging him to negotiate another loan of $20 million, knew that the alliance was the only thing that was keeping the helter-skelter American government alive. To have revealed the vitriolic attitudes of Adams and Jay toward France might well have wrecked the alliance, and would have almost certainly sabotaged the desperately needed loan. Moreover, if Franklin had pulled out of the peace negotiations, the entire structure would have come tumbling down. He was the cornerstone around whom Shelburne had built his entire negotiation, at least in the spring and early summer of 1782, when England was desperate for peace. Finally, the important thing was peace, even if it was short of the continental triumph which Franklin had been constructing before Jay and Adams arrived on the scene. So the next morning, when Franklin met with his two fellow commissioners, he told them the decision he had reached, during the night. “I am of your opinion, and will go on with these gentlemen in the business without consulting this Court.”
But now the three Americans faced an entirely different game. With the news of Gibraltar in their hands, the British were the ones who were on the offensive, and the four necessary articles which Jay had proposed as the complete treaty came flying back from London, with no confirmation and a tough new negotiator to stiffen Oswald’s spine. His name was Henry Strachey. Franklin and Adams had met him when they conferred with Lord Howe in 1776 on Staten Island. The oldest clerk in the foreign office, he was, in Adams’ opinion, “as artful and insinuating a man as they could send; he pushes and presses every point as far as it can possibly go.” Henceforth, the Americans were on the defensive, fighting to hold onto what they could legitimately claim, and beating off a ferocious British effort to compensate the loyalists. This was vital to Shelburne’s political existence. London was thronged with loyalists who were besieging every politician in Parliament, insisting that their claims for compensation for their confiscated estates in America be honored in some way. The British were almost as insistent on a clause that excluded the Americans from all but the most minimal use of the Newfoundland fisheries. They were also determined to guarantee the payment of American debts to British merchants in honest money. As a final bite, almost as if they wanted to show their renewed cockiness, they announced that eastern Massachusetts, practically the entire present-day state of Maine, belonged to the province of Nova Scotia.
For six consecutive days, from early in the morning until well after dark, the negotiators argued bitterly and sometimes violently over the first two demands. The Americans agreed readily enough to the clause on prewar debts. John Adams, having once been assigned by Massachusetts to set the Maine boundary, thoroughly refuted Strachey on that point.
In the argument over the fisheries, Franklin played a key role. As a Massachusetts man, John Adams ought to have taken the lead, but as he noted in his diary, he knew “nothing myself, but as an hearsay witness.” Franklin put him in touch with Jonathan Williams at Nantes, who obtained from a Marblehead man at the port a detailed account of the rights that America had hitherto exercised off the Grand Banks. Adams then did most of the talking, and later took all the credit for winning most of what the Americans wanted, although the word “right” was diluted to “liberty,” a loss which caused some problems in future years.
But when the argument turned to the loyalists, Franklin took charge of the American delegation. At first both Jay and Adams wavered toward concession. Franklin blazingly refused to countenance any kind of compensation.
There was an explanation for Franklin’s intransigence which no other biographer has heretofore noted. Ex-Governor William Franklin had arrived in London to rescue what he could from the wreckage of his life. He had left New York under a very odious cloud. As president of the Board of Associated Loyalists, he was responsible for planning the numerous small but savage raids which the loyalists had executed against their fellow Americans in New York and vicinity. On one of these, they had captured a fort at Toms River, New Jersey, and had taken prisoner an American captain named Joshua Huddy, a member of the New Jersey militia. The loyalists accused Huddy and his friends of killing one of their partisans, Philip White, and on April 12, 1782, they hanged Huddy from a tree in Monmouth County.
The repercussions of this brutal episode soon reached all the way to Europe, and involved Franklin in an intensely embarrassing gaffe. The outraged Americans demanded that the loyalist officer in charge of the hanging, Captain Richard Lippencot, be handed over to them, or they would exact eye-for-eye vengeance on a British prisoner of equal rank. Under direct orders from Congress, Washington selected by lot Captain Charles Asgill, son of a wealthy and influential English family, and informed the British high command that if Lippencot was not surrendered forthwith, young Asgill, he was only nineteen, would soon be swinging from the end of a rope. Asgill’s mother and father used every iota of their formidable influence to extricate their son. They bombarded George III and Louis XVI with memorials and petitions. Vergennes asked Franklin to intercede, and Shelburne instructed Oswald to make an even more fervent appeal to him.
Tartly, Franklin replied, “The situation of Captain Asgill and his family afflicts me, but I do not see what can be done by anyone here to relieve them. It cannot be supposed, that General Washington has the least desire of taking the life of that gentleman. His aim is to obtain the punishment of a deliberate murder, committed on a prisoner in cold blood, by Captain Lippencot. If the English refuse to deliver up or punish this murderer, it is saying that they choose to preserve him rather than Captain Asgill. It seems to me, therefore, that the application should be made to the English ministers for positive orders, directing General Carleton the new British commander-in-chief in America, to deliver up Lippencot; which orders, being obtained, should be despatched immediately by a swift sailing vessel. I do not think any other means can produce the effect desired.”
Meanwhile, in New York, Carleton had arrested Lippencot and court martialed him. But the board of officers who heard his case acquitted him on the grounds that he had only obeyed orders. Where had these orders come from? From the Board of Associated Loyalists, This soon led to a demand by the Americans for William Franklin’s head, and the ex-governor decided it might be just as well if he got out of the country. The war was obviously lost anyway, and when a group of loyalists asked him to be their official representative in London, and in that role to present a petition to the King, begging his Majesty to make good the financial losses they had suffered, William seized the opportunity to depart with at least a semblance of dignity.
It must have been deeply humiliating, and infuriating, for Franklin to discover that the murderer he was calling upon the British to
deliver up in such tough style in his letter to Oswald was his own son. Asgill was finally extricated by a direct appeal from Louis XVI to Congress, and Washington let him go with obvious relief. The incident, coming as it did so close to the end of the war, when most of the bloodshed had ended, had enormous emotional impact throughout America and probably did more than any single event to make the Tories odious to the patriots, for decades to come.
William Franklin arrived in London late in September just as the really hard bargaining over terms for the loyalists began in Paris.
We know that Franklin was aware of William’s arrival because Benjamin Vaughan, Shelburne’s agent, wrote a strong letter urging the Prime Minister to do something handsome for the ex-governor. The source of his plea was none other than William Temple Franklin, who had talked to Vaughan behind his grandfather’s back. Vaughan completely swallowed Temple’s argument that “a compliment in that quarter” would have a “seasonable effect . . . upon your American affairs.”
Both Vaughan and Temple miscalculated the depth of Franklin’s bitterness toward William. The knowledge that his son was to be the chief negotiating agent for the defeated loyalists made it inevitable that Franklin would fight giving them even a shilling of compensation. There was also a stringent political issue involved. As John Adams pointed out in his letters and diaries, if the Americans agreed to a thoroughgoing compensation for the loyalists, they would in effect be admitting that the American rebellion was unjust and that the loyalists, by getting full value for their confiscated estates, were the honest up-holders of law and order which they styled themselves. Before the eyes of the civilized world, the Revolution would be clouded with a virtual confession of illegality. But as the bargaining grew fiercer, both Adams and Jay inclined toward some palliative form of compensation. Not Franklin. He remained absolutely and totally opposed to the idea, and since he had gone along with the reckless, not to say brainless diplomacy of his two colleagues in regard to Canada, they had to go along with him now. “Dr. Franklin is very staunch against the Tories,” Adams told his diary, with just a touch of bewilderment.
Not being a psychologist, in fact, being the very opposite of one, John Adams was totally incapable of analyzing Franklin’s motives. The real reason never dawned on him or the bewildered Vaughan. Shelburne did take the trouble to see William Franklin sometime during October 1782, and he expressed deep sympathy both for the ex-governor personally and for the sad plight of all the loyalists. It must have been doubly galling to William to learn from the Prime Minister that his negotiators were making an all-out effort on behalf of him and his friends and that the man who stood immovably in their path was Benjamin Franklin.
For a final blow, William soon learned that the treaty called for the surrender of the western lands between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi, which meant the annihilation of whatever hopes he had had for making a profit on his Vandalia stock. Later William angrily asked Richard Oswald why he had given away a fifth of the continent to the Americans.
“Your father, Dr. Franklin,” Oswald said, “insisted on a boundary being drawn. The Doctor ran his finger along the map to indicate the desired boundaries. And what could I object to a man of Dr. Franklin’s influence and authority?”
On November 29, only the loyalists stood between the negotiators and complete agreement. Two days earlier, Benjamin Vaughan had returned from London, where he had thoroughly discussed all aspects of the treaty with Shelburne. Parliament, after having been prorogued twice by the jittery Prime Minister, was about to meet. If he did not have at least a preliminary peace with the Americans to show the backbenchers, almost certainly he would be voted out of office. “We have liberal American commissioners in Paris, a liberal English commissioner, and a liberal First Minister for England,” Vaughan pleaded. “All these circumstances may vanish tomorrow, if this treaty blows over.” Adams suggested sending a courier to London for more instructions. The British replied that would mean having “all laid loose before Parliament it was going to sea again.”
Then Franklin unleashed a thunderbolt. “If another messenger is to be sent London,” he said, “he ought to carry something more respecting a compensation to the sufferers in America.”
He took from his pocket a paper, and began to read: “It is agreed, that His Britannic Majesty will earnestly recommend it, to his Parliament, to provide for and make a compensation to the merchants and shopkeepers of Boston, whose goods and merchandise was seized and taken out of their stores, warehouses and shops by order of General Gage, and others of his commanders and officers there; and also to the inhabitants of Philadelphia for the goods taken away by his army there; and to make compensation also, for the tobacco, rice, indigo and Negroes, &c., seized and carried off by his armies, under Generals Arnold, Cornwallis and others from the states of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, and also for all vessels and cargoes belonging to the inhabitants of the said United States, which were stopped, seized or taken, either in the ports, or on the seas, by governors, or his ships of war, before the declaration of war against the said states. And it is further agreed, that His Britannic Majesty will also earnestly recommend it to his Parliament, to make compensation for all the towns, villages, and farms, burnt and destroyed by his troops or adherents, in the said United States.”
The English commissioners stared at each other for a moment in uneasy silence. They then withdrew to a nearby room for a hurried conference. A few minutes later; they returned, and Allyne Fitzherbert, the diplomat who had been negotiating with the French, and who had joined the American negotiations as they neared the climax, quietly agreed to accept the treaty, as it stood. They only asked one favor, as a sop to British public opinion. Would the Americans agree to insert in the treaty a promise that Congress would petition the states to restore or at least make compensation for the seized property of loyalists who had not made themselves obnoxious to their fellow Americans? This idea came from Oswald, and perhaps he, who was closer to Franklin than any other negotiator, had finally divined what was going on in Franklin’s mind. Since Jay and Adams were already inclined to give the loyalists even more than this minimal gesture, the deal was made, when Franklin agreed. Both sides knew that it meant nothing, since dealing with the loyalists was a prerogative which Congress had left entirely to the states. Even so, Franklin saw to it that the agreement specified that loyalists who had “borne arms against the said United States” were excluded. This, of course, applied directly to William Franklin.
The next morning, the four American commissioners, Henry Laurens had joined them at the last moment, met in Oswald’s room and signed the “preliminary articles.” As a bow to the French alliance, the treaty’s preface specified that it was not to be concluded “until terms of peace shall be agreed upon between Great Britain and France,” The same day, Franklin sent a copy of the treaty to Vergennes at Versailles, and then invited his two colleagues to join him for dinner at Passy. Everyone was in an ebullient mood. Adams confided to his diary, as if it was an amazing revelation, that Franklin had “gone on with us with entire harmony and unanimity throughout, and has been able and useful, both by his sagacity and his reputation, in the whole negotiation.” But Honest John could not forbear writing one more of his absurdities. He noted that a Frenchman had called him “the Washington of the negotiation,” but he felt that the title ought more justly to go to John Jay. With Washingtons like Jay and Adams, the American Revolution would have ended in 1776. The combined diplomatic accomplishment of their seven years in two European capitals was two puny loans and a minor treaty (with Holland), negotiated after Yorktown.
No one can question the zeal and energy these men gave to their country’s cause. Both made major contributions to the founding of the nation, in other areas of the revolutionary struggle. The austere Jay never succumbed to Adams’ childish jealousy; he remained an admirer of Franklin for the rest of his life. But his children and grandchildren entered the historical lists on his behalf, and did th
eir utmost to build his reputation at Franklin’s expense. Adams went on slandering Franklin for the rest of his long life, and his descendants continued throwing mud unto the fourth generation. Yet there remains the inextinguishable fact, for anyone who looks dispassionately at the record. There was a Washington of negotiation. His name was Benjamin Franklin.
With peace almost secured, Franklin had the sticky task of placating France and wringing from her one more desperately needed loan. The days went by, and nothing but a frigid silence emanated from Vergennes’ office in Versailles. Cautiously Franklin paid him a personal call. The two men, friends as well as diplomatic allies, discussed the American treaty in an atmosphere of perfect politeness. But Vergennes made it clear to Franklin that the Americans’ “abrupt signature” of their treaty without prior consultation “had little in it which could be agreeable to the King.” Franklin defended himself and his colleagues by pointing to the preliminary clause, which specified that the treaty would not become effective until France completed her negotiations. He undoubtedly quoted for Vergennes the frantic statements Vaughan had made about the precarious state of the Shelburne ministry. Vergennes, with his army of spies in London and in the other courts of Europe, knew this as well as Franklin. But the Count made his continuing displeasure evident by doing nothing about Franklin’s plea for more money.
Finally, on December 15, 1782, Franklin was forced to send him a delicate ultimatum. The American ship Washington was about to sail for America, carrying the Preliminary Articles. The ship had a British passport. Franklin knew that the Count would instantly see this as a hint that Britain and America were drifting toward reconciliation. It would also arouse fears that the British would use the ship to circulate anti-French propaganda about the preliminary treaty throughout America. In the teeth of the foreign minister’s certain wrath, Franklin calmly asked him for a first installment on a loan, which he had not yet promised to give. “I fear the Congress will be reduced to despair when they find that nothing is yet obtained,” Franklin said. This was both a threat and a warning that America might well drop out of the war.
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