Walter Isaacson Great Innovators e-book boxed set

by Walter Isaacson

  When Howe sent a barge to ferry the American delegation to Staten Island, he instructed his officer to stay behind as a hostage. Franklin and his committee brought the officer with them as a gesture of confidence in Howe’s honor. Although Howe marched his guests past a double line of menacing Hessian mercenaries, the three-hour meeting on September 11 was cordial, and the Americans were treated to a feast of good claret, ham, tongue, and mutton.

  Howe pledged that the colonies could have what they had requested in the Olive Branch Petition: control over their own legislation and taxes, and “a revisal of any of the plantation laws by which the colonists may be aggrieved.” The British, he said, were still kindly disposed toward the Americans: “When an American falls, England feels it.” He felt the same, even more strongly. If America fell, he said, “I should feel and lament it like the loss of a brother.”

  Adams recorded Franklin’s retort: “Dr. Franklin, with an easy air and collected countenance, a bow, a smile and all that naiveté which sometimes appeared in his conversation and is often observed in his writings, replied, ‘My Lord, we will do our utmost endeavors to save your Lordship that mortification.’ ”

  The dispute that was causing this horrible war, Howe insisted, was merely about the method Britain should use in raising taxes from America. Franklin replied, “That we never refused, upon requisition.”

  America offered other sources of strength to the empire, Howe continued, including “her men.” Franklin, whose writings on population growth Howe knew well, agreed. “We have a pretty considerable manufactury of men.”

  Why then, Howe asked, was it not possible “to put a stop to these ruinous extremities?”

  Because, Franklin replied, it was too late for any peace that required a return to allegiance to the king. “Forces have been sent out and towns have been burnt,” he said. “We cannot now expect happiness under the domination of Great Britain. All former attachments have been obliterated.” Adams, likewise, “mentioned warmly his own determination not to depart from the idea of independency.”

  The Americans suggested that Howe send home for authority to negotiate with them as an independent nation. That was a “vain” hope, replied Howe.

  “Well, my Lord,” said Franklin, “as America is to expect nothing but upon unconditional submission…”

  Howe interrupted. He was not demanding submission. But it was clear, he acknowledged, that no accommodation was possible, at least for now, and he apologized that “the gentlemen had the trouble of coming so far to so little purpose.”45

  To France, with Temple and Benny

  Within two weeks of his return from meeting Lord Howe, Franklin was chosen, by a congressional committee acting in great secrecy, to embark on the most dangerous, complex, and fascinating of all his public missions. He was to cross the Atlantic yet again to become an envoy in Paris, with the goal of cajoling from France, now enjoying a rare peace with Britain, the aid and alliance without which it was unlikely that America could prevail.

  It was an odd appointment. Elderly and ailing, Franklin was now happily ensconced, finally, in a family nest that actually included members of his own brood. But there was a certain logic, from the Congress’s perspective, to the choice. Though he had visited there only twice, he was the most famous and revered American in France. In addition, as a member of the Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence, Franklin had held confidential talks over the past year with a variety of French intermediaries. Among them was Julien de Bonvouloir, an agent personally approved by the new king, Louis XVI. Franklin met with him three times in December 1775, and came away with the impression, though Bonvouloir was scrupulously circumspect, that France would be willing to support, at least secretly, the American rebellion.46

  Two other commissioners were also chosen for the mission to France: Silas Deane, a merchant and congressional delegate from Connecticut who had already been sent to Paris in March 1776, and Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson begged off for family reasons, his place was given to the cantankerous Virginian Arthur Lee, who had taken over Franklin’s duties as a colonial agent in London.

  Franklin professed to accept the assignment reluctantly. “I am old and good for nothing,” he said to his friend Benjamin Rush, who was sitting next to him in the Congress. “But as the storekeepers say of their remnants of cloth, I am but a fag end, and you may have me for what you are pleased to give.”47

  Yet, knowing Franklin—with his love for travel, attraction to new experiences, taste for Europe, and (perhaps) his proclivity to run away from awkward situations—it is likely that he welcomed the assignment, and there is some evidence that he sought it. During the Secret Committee’s deliberations the previous month, he had written a “Sketch of Propositions for Peace” with England, which the committee ended up not using. In his draft, Franklin noted his own inclination for going back to England:

  Having such propositions to make, or any powers to treat of peace, will furnish a pretence for B.F.’s going to England, where he has many friends and acquaintances, particularly among the best writers and ablest speakers in both Houses of Parliament; he thinks he shall be able when there, if the terms are not accepted, to work up such a division of sentiments in the nation as to greatly weaken its exertions against the United States.48

  His meeting with Lord Howe, which occurred after he had drafted this memo, made a mission to England less enticing, especially compared to the possibilities of Paris. From his previous visits he knew that he would love Paris, and it would certainly be safer than remaining in America with the outcome of war so unclear (Howe was edging closer to Philadelphia at the time). A few of Franklin’s enemies, including the British ambassador to Paris and some American loyalists, thought he was finding a pretense to flee the danger. Even his friend Edmund Burke, the pro-American philosopher and member of Parliament, thought so. “I will never believe,” he said, “that he is going to conclude a long life, which has brightened every hour it continued, with so foul and dishonorable flight.”49

  Such suspicions were probably too harsh. If personal safety were his prime concern, a wartime crossing of an ocean controlled by the enemy’s navy at age 70 while plagued with gout and kidney stones was not the most logical course. As with all of Franklin’s decisions about crossing the Atlantic, this one involved many conflicting emotions and desires. But surely the opportunity to serve his country in a task for which there was no American better equipped, and the chance to live and be feted in Paris, were simple enough reasons to explain his decision. As he prepared for his departure, he withdrew more than £3,000 from his bank account and lent it to the Congress for prosecuting the war.

  His grandson Temple had been spending the summer taking care of his forlorn stepmother in New Jersey. The arrest of her husband had left Elizabeth Franklin, who was fragile in the best of times, completely distraught. “I can do nothing but sigh and cry,” she wrote her sister-in-law Sally Bache in July. “My hand shakes to such a degree that I can scarcely hold a pen.” In pleading with Temple to come stay with her, she complained of the “unruly soldiers” who surrounded her mansion. “They have been extremely rude, insolent and abusive to me and have terrified me almost out of my senses.” They even, she added, tried to steal Temple’s pet dog.50

  Temple arrived at his stepmother’s house at the end of July, typically forgetting some of his clothes on the way. (“There seems to be,” his grandfather wrote, “a kind of fatality attending the conveyance of your things between Amboy and Philadelphia.”) The elder Franklin sent along some money for Elizabeth, but she begged for something more. Couldn’t he “sign a parole” so that William would be permitted to return to his family? “Consider, my Dear and Honored Sir, that I am now pleading the cause of your son and my beloved husband.” Franklin refused, and he dismissed her pitiful complaints about her plight by noting that others were suffering far worse at the hands of the British. Nor did he make any effort to see her when he passed through Amboy on his way to meet Lord Howe.
Ever since her marriage to his son, he had shown little desire to befriend her, visit her, or correspond with her, much less engage in any of the flatteries he usually lavished on younger women.51

  Temple was more sympathetic. In early September, he made plans to travel to Connecticut so he could visit his captive father and bring him a letter from Elizabeth. But Franklin forbade him to go, saying that it was important for him to resume his studies in Philadelphia soon. Temple kept pushing. He had no secret information, just a letter he wanted to deliver. His grandfather remained unmoved. “You are mistaken in imagining that I am apprehensive of your carrying dangerous intelligence to your father,” he chided. “You would have been more in the right if you could have suspected me of a little tender concern for your welfare.” If Elizabeth wanted to write her husband, he added, she could do so in care of the Connecticut governor, and he even included some franked stationery for that purpose.

  Franklin, in fact, realized that his grandson had other motives—one bad, the other honorable—for wanting to go see his father: “I rather think the project takes its rise from your own inclination to ramble and disinclination for returning to college, joined with a desire I do not blame of seeing a father you have so much reason to love.” Not blaming him for wanting to see his father? Saying he had so much reason to love him? For Franklin, such sentiments with regard to William were somewhat surprising, even poignant. They did, however, come in a letter that had denied William’s son the right to visit him.52

  The dispute became moot less than a week later. Careful about keeping the news of his appointment as envoy to France secret, Franklin was cryptic. “I hope you will return hither immediately and your mother will make no objections to it,” he wrote. “Something offering here that will be much to your advantage.”

  In deciding to take Temple to France, Franklin never consulted with Elizabeth, who would die a year later without seeing her husband or stepson again. Nor did he inform William, who did not learn until later of the departure of his sole son, a lad he had gotten to know for only a year. It is a testament to the powerful personal force exerted by Benjamin Franklin, a man so often callous about the feelings of his family, that William was so pitifully accepting of the situation. “If the old gentleman has taken the boy with him,” he wrote to his forlorn wife, “I hope it is only to put him in some foreign university.”53

  Franklin also decided to take along his other grandson, Benny Bache. So it was an odd trio that set sail on October 27, 1776, aboard a cramped but speedy American warship aptly named Reprisal: a restless old man about to turn 71, plagued by poor health but still ambitious and adventurous, heading for a friendless land from whence he was convinced he would never return, accompanied by a high-spirited, frivolous lad of about 17 and a brooding, eager-to-please child who had just turned 7. The experience in Europe would be good for his grandchildren, he hoped, and their presence would be comforting to him. Two years later, writing of Temple but using words that applied to both boys, Franklin explained one reason he wanted them along: “If I die, I have a child to close my eyes.”54

  Chapter Thirteen

  Courtier

  Paris, 1776–1778

  The World’s Most Famous American

  The rough winter crossing aboard the Reprisal, though a fast thirty days, “almost demolished me,” Franklin later recalled. The salt beef brought back his boils and rashes, the other food was too tough for his old teeth, and the small frigate pitched so violently that he barely slept. So, on sighting the coast of Brittany, an exhausted Franklin, unwilling to wait for winds to take him closer to Paris, had a fishing boat ferry him and his two bewildered grandchildren to the tiny village of Auray. Until he could get to Paris by coach, he wrote John Hancock, he would avoid taking “a public character” and try to keep a low profile, “thinking it prudent first to know whether the court is ready and willing to receive ministers publicly from the Congress.”1

  France was not a place, however, where the world’s most famous American would find, nor truly seek, anonymity. When his carriage reached Nantes, the city feted him at a hastily arranged grand ball, where Franklin reigned as a celebrity philosopher-statesman and Temple marveled at the height of the women’s ornately adorned coiffures. After seeing Franklin’s soft fur cap, the ladies of Nantes began wearing wigs that imitated it, a style that became known as the coiffure à la Franklin.

  To the French, this lightning-defying scientist and tribune of liberty who had unexpectedly appeared on their shores was a symbol both of the virtuous frontier freedom romanticized by Rousseau and of the Enlightenment’s reasoned wisdom championed by Voltaire. For more than eight years he would play his roles to the hilt. In a clever and deliberate manner, leavened by the wit and joie de vivre the French so adored, he would cast the American cause, through his own personification of it, as that of the natural state fighting the corrupted one, the enlightened state fighting the irrational old order.

  Into his hands, almost as much as those of Washington and others, had been placed the fate of the Revolution. Unless he could secure the support of France—its aid, its recognition, its navy—America would find it difficult to prevail. Already the greatest American scientist and writer of his time, he would display a dexterity that would make him the greatest American diplomat of all times. He played to the romance as well as the reason that entranced France’s philosophes, to the fascination with America’s freedom that captivated its public, and to the cold calculation of national interest that moved its ministers.

  With its 440-year tradition of regular wars with England, France was a ripe potential ally, especially because it yearned to avenge the loss it suffered in the most recent American outcropping of these struggles, the Seven Years’ War. Just before he left, Franklin learned that France had agreed to send some aid to the American rebels secretly through a cutout commercial entity.

  But convincing France to do more was not going to be easy. The nation was now financially strapped, ostensibly at peace with Britain, and understandably cautious about betting big on a country that, after Washington’s precipitous retreat from Long Island, looked like a loser. In addition, neither Louis XVI nor his ministers were instinctive champions of America’s desire, which might prove contagious, to cast off hereditary monarchs.

  Among Franklin’s cards was his fame, and he was among a long line of statesmen, from Richelieu to Metternich to Kissinger, to realize that with celebrity came cachet, and with that came influence. His lightning theories had been proved in France in 1752, his collected works published there in 1773, and a new edition of Poor Richard’s The Way to Wealth, entitled La Science du Bonhomme Richard, was published soon after his arrival and reprinted four times in two years. His fame was so great that people lined the streets hoping to get a glimpse of his entry into Paris on December 21, 1776.

  Within weeks, all of fashionable Paris seemed to desire some display of his benign countenance. Medallions were struck in various sizes, engravings and portraits were hung in homes, and his likeness graced snuffboxes and signet rings. “The numbers sold are incredible,” he wrote his daughter, Sally. “These, with the pictures, busts and prints (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere), have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon.” The fad went so far as to mildly annoy, though still amuse, the king himself. He gave the Comtesse Diane de Polignac, who had bored him often with her praise of Franklin, a Sèvres porcelain chamber pot with his cameo embossed inside.2

  “His reputation was more universal than that of Leibniz, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more loved and esteemed,” John Adams would recall many years later, after his own jealousy of Franklin’s fame had somewhat subsided. “There was scarcely a peasant or a citizen, a valet de chambre, coachman or footman, a lady’s chambermaid or a scullion in the kitchen who was not familiar with Franklin’s name.”3

  The French even tried to claim him as one of their own. He always assumed, as noted at the beginning of this book, that his s
urname came from the class of landowning English freemen known as franklins, and he was almost surely correct. But the Gazette of Amiens reported that the name Franquelin was common in the province of Picardie, from which many families had emigrated to England.

  Various groups of French philosophers, in addition to the disciples of Voltaire and Rousseau, also made intellectual claims on him. Most notable were the physiocrats, who pioneered the field of economics and developed the doctrine of laissez-faire. The group became for him a new Junto, and he wrote essays for their monthly journal.

  One of the most famous physiocrats, Pierre-Samuel Du Pont de Nemours (who emigrated in 1799 and with his son founded the Du-Pont chemical company), described his friend Franklin in almost mythic terms. “His eyes reveal a perfect equanimity,” he wrote, “and his lips the smile of an unalterable serenity.” Others were awed by the fact that he dressed so plainly and wore no wig. “Everything in him announced the simplicity and the innocence of primitive morals,” marveled one Parisian, who added the perfect French compliment about his love of silence: “He knew how to be impolite without being rude.”

  His taciturnity and unadorned dress led many to mistake him for a Quaker. One French cleric reported shortly after Franklin’s arrival, “This Quaker wears the full dress of his sect. He has a handsome physiognomy, glasses always on his eyes, very little hair, a fur cap, which he always wears.” It was an impression he did little to correct, for Franklin knew that fascination about the Quakers was fashionable in France. Voltaire had famously extolled their peaceful simplicity in four of his “Letters on England,” and as Carl Van Doren has noted, “Paris admired the sect for its gentle and resolute merits.”4